Piano In the Foreground (Remastered) Duke Ellington

• 1 I Can't Get Started 04:26
• 2 Cong-go 04:18
• 3 Body and Soul 04:52
• 4 Blues for Jerry 04:42
• 5 Fontainebleau Forest 02:54
• 6 Summertime 03:54
• 7 It's Bad to Be Forgotten 03:24
• 8 A Hundred Dreams Ago 02:28
• 9 So 04:35
• 10 Searching (Pleading for Love) 01:52
• 11 Springtime in Africa 03:50
• Total Runtime 41:15

Info for Piano In the Foreground (Remastered)

„Piano in the Foreground“ is an album by American pianist, composer and bandleader Duke Ellington recorded and released on the Columbia label in 1961. It features Ellington in a small group setting, emphasising his own piano prowess rather than the big band arrangements more typical of his recordings.

Produced by the famous Jazz producer Irving Townshend, this Ellington trio recording done in one afternoon features the Duke out in front doing what he does best - play Piano! Transferred from the original 3 track analog master tapes directly to master lacquer using Bernie Grundman's all tube cutting system reveals nuance on this recording never before heard on previous pressings. Now on Classic's 200g Quiex Super Vinyl Profile this is a must have compendium to "Piano in the Background" also available from Classic Records.

In the liner notes to this reissue of Duke's 1961 LP, Joe Goldberg says, "If Ellington did nothing but play the piano, he would be a giant." Duke wows with I Can't Get Started; Cong-Go; Body and Soul; Summertime; Springtime in Africa , and more-including eight bonus recordings from '57!

Duke Ellington, piano
Aaron Bell, bass (tracks 1-12)
Jimmy Woode, bass (tracks 13-18)
Sam Woodyard, drums

Recorded March 1 & 2, 1961 at Columbia 30th Street Studio; Radio Recorders
Produced by Irving Townshend

Digitally remastered

Duke Ellington
called his music 'American Music' rather than jazz, and liked to describe those who impressed him as 'beyond category. He remains one of the most influential figures in jazz, if not in all American music and is widely considered as one of the twentieth century's best known African American personalities. As both a composer and a band leader, Ellington's reputation has increased since his death, with thematic repackaging of his signature music often becoming best-sellers. Posthumous recognition of his work include a special award citation from the Pulitzer Prize Board.

Duke Ellington influenced millions of people both around the world and at home. He gave American music its own sound for the first time. In his fifty year career, he played over 20,000 performances in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East as well as Asia.

Simply put, Ellington transcends boundaries and fills the world with a treasure trove of music that renews itself through every generation of fans and music-lovers. His legacy continues to live onand will endure for generations to come. Winton Marsalis said it best when he said 'His music sounds like America.' Because of the unmatched artistic heights to which he soared, no one deserved the phrase “beyond category” more than Ellington, for it aptly describes his life as well. He was most certainly one of a kind that maintained a lifestyle with universal appeal which transcended countless boundaries.

Duke Ellington is best remembered for the over 3000 songs that he composed during his lifetime. His best known titles include; 'It Don't Mean a Thing if It Ain't Got That Swing', 'Sophisticated Lady', 'Mood Indigo', “Solitude', 'In a Mellotone', and 'Satin Doll'. The most amazing part about Ellington was the most creative while he was on the road. It was during this time when he wrote his most famous piece, 'Mood Indigo'which brought him world wide fame.

Duke Ellington's popular compositions set the bar for generations of brilliant jazz, pop, theatre and soundtrack composers to come. While these compositions guarantee his greatness, what makes Duke an iconoclastic genius, and an unparalleled visionary, what has granted him immortality are his extended suites. From 1943's Black, Brown and Beige to 1972's The Uwis Suite, Duke used the suite format to give his jazz songs a far more empowering meaning, resonance and purpose: to exalt, mythologize and re-contextualize the African-American experience on a grand scale.

Duke Ellington was partial to giving brief verbal accounts of the moods his songs captured. Reading those accounts is like looking deep into the background of an old photo of New York and noticing the lost and almost unaccountable details that gave the city its character during Ellington's heyday, which began in 1927 when his band made the Cotton Club its home. ''The memory of things gone,'' Ellington once said, ''is important to a jazz musician,'' and the stories he sometimes told about his songs are the record of those things gone. But what is gone returns, its pulse kicking, when Ellington's music plays, and never mind what past it is, for the music itself still carries us forward today.

Duke Ellington was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1966. He was later awarded several other prizes, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969, and the Legion of Honor by France in 1973, the highest civilian honors in each country. He died of lung cancer and pneumonia on May 24, 1974, a month after his 75th birthday, and is buried in the Bronx, in New York City. At his funeral attended by over 12,000 people at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Ella Fitzgerald summed up the occasion, 'It's a very sad day...A genius has passed.'

This album contains no booklet.