Jazz Party in Stereo

A November 8, 1943 World Transcription session survives from Diz's early experience as a member of Ellington's band, although Gillespie is not widely featured. The second recorded encounter of the two musicians would take place nearly a decade later. It consists of Duke's second November 14, 1952 Carnegie Hall concert featuring Diz as a special guest on a version of "Body and Soul". Gillespie would also make a guest appearance with the orchestra on the June 24, 1957 session from the Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington songbook series. He backed Ella on "Take the 'A' Train" along with other members of Duke's band (and Ellington himself on piano). Both Duke and Diz were present for the 1959 Timex All Stars TV show, but they only performed together there on one number; a crowded and noisy version of "Perdido" that featured all of the bands participating on the show playing together simultaneously (with nearly forty musicians on stage), thus little is heard of each of them. Ellington and Gillespie made their only serious collaboration on February 19, 1959, when Diz participated on Duke's Columbia album Jazz Party, reissued here, and which also includes one of the few appearances of singer Jimmy Rushing with the Ellington band. Dizzy and Duke would share the stage on many other occasions over the following years, although they would be recorded together on just one other time, during the September 18, 1965 concert at the Monterey Jazz Festival, when Dizzy again joined Ellington's orchestra (Morris Goldenberg, George Gaber, Elden C. Bailey, Chauncey M. Rosengarden, Walter E. Rosenberger, Bradley Spinney, Milton Schlesinger (percussion). - jazzmasters INCLUDES FREE MP3 ALBUM DOWNLOAD.