DUKE ELLINGTON ORCHESTRA: Music Is My Mistress - conducted by Mercer Ellington

Music Is My MISTRESS THE DUKE ELLINGTON Liner notes

As these words were written, Mercer Ellington and his orchestra were riding the crest of a success wave, the like of which he had not celebrated since he inherited the band from Duke 14 years before. The album Digital Duke had won Mercer his first Grammy Award; the orchestra had enjoyed a rare opportunity to sit down, playing for more than four months with the Duke Ellington musical show Sophisticated Ladies in Atlantic City; the band was preparing to go on an extended tour of Japan. The only problem was: after the Grammy victory, what to do for an encore-? Aided by Musical Heritage Society's Jeffrey Nissim and producer Teo Macero, Mercer found the answer in this unique collection. Unlike its predecessor, which consisted entirely of rearranged works out of Duke's old library, here we have a perfectly balanced set comprising more of these earlier pieces (some in their pristine form, others brilliantly updated), along with the first examples in many years of Mercer's own too-often-neglected talent as composer and arranger.