HutchFan

sidewinder -- are you referring In Walked Sonny, the LP that Stitt made with Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers? Or is there another one?

Well put! Still rolling with EKE this morning: The Complete 1932-40 Brunswick, Columbia and Master Recordings of Duke Ellington and His Orchestra (Mosaic) Disc 1 Duke Ellington - Blues in Orbit (Columbia/Legacy)

I like Grayson and Hibbler and Jeffries and all those guys. I just prefer Ivie's singing. For example, has anyone ever done a better version of "I Got It Bad (and That Ain't Good)"?

Dipping into the big RCA Duke box again tonight: The Duke Ellington Centennial Edition: The Complete RCA Victor Recordings (1927-1973) Discs 11 & 12 Ivie Anderson. The best Ellington vocalist ever? ...Betty Roché comes close, but she didn't stay long. Nell Brookshire was wasn't half bad. Adelaide Hall's and Kay Davis' wordless vocal things were beautiful. ...But I'd put Ivie in the pole position. Anderson may not have had a knock-you-on-your-booty voice -- but she had soul. IMHO, none of the men come close. I do like Herb Jeffries "Flamingo"; otherwise, I'd rather hear the ladies sing.

Dizzy Gillespie - Odyssey: 1945-1952 (Savoy) Disc 1 Duke Ellington - The Private Collection, Vol. 2: Dance Concerts, California, 1958 (Saja)

More from this treasure trove: The Duke Ellington Centennial Edition: The Complete RCA Victor Recordings (1927-1973) Disc 22 - The Popular Duke Ellington, the EKE cuts from The Jazz Piano, and the beginning of The Duke at Tanglewood

The Duke Ellington Centennial Edition: The Complete RCA Victor Recordings (1927-1973) Disc 21 - The Far East Suite Sublime!

Go, Ken, go!

Bill Barron - The Next Plateau (Muse, 1989)

I have Kondrashin's recording of DSCH's Fourth on vinyl only. So I'm no help to you. Sorry.

Ralph Towner - Batik (ECM)

This again: Ralph Towner / Solstice - Sound and Shadows (ECM) with Jan Garbarek, Eberhard Weber, and Jon Christensen

In you continue in order... Kondrashin's recording of DSCH's Symphony No. 4 is a "desert-island disc" for this listener!

Very cool. It's always fun when early discoveries hold up!

Yeah. That photo is... uh, let's just say "Goofy." OTOH, the music is excellent -- a DBQ record that I frequently pull from the shelf.

Good fun.

Such a great record! I'm going to queue that one up next.

Roy Brooks - The Free Slave (Muse, rec. 1970) with George Coleman, Woody Shaw, Hugh Lawson, and Cecil McBee Outstanding.

and

Arnold Bax: Symphony No. 4; Tintagel / Bryden Thomson, Ulster Orchestra (Chandos)

I'm a Russian literature and history junkie, but I've never read those Sholokhov books. I need to fix that, add And Quiet Flows the Don to my reading list.

From this listener's point of view, Kondrashin's DSCH is unsurpassed. NP: Hard to beat Reiner's "Living Stereo" Scheherazade. It's scary good.

Disc 2 - Music by Rimsky-Korsakov and Liadov conducted by Markevitch or Maazel