Duke Ellington and His Orchestra
Impex Records IMP6058-45
180g 45RPM x2
By Dennis Davis
Digging out my review of Impex’s original Ellington Indigos 33 RPM re-issue, I was more than a little shocked to see that over a decade has passed since that release. So many re-issue labels have issued their 33 RPM titles at 45 RPM, often with less than remarkable improvements, that I really was not expecting a dramatic improvement from this new 45 RPM version, despite that label’s stellar track record. In at least one situation–Music Matters’ Blue Note reissues—the one-disc 33 RPM versions consistently sounded as good as or better than earlier 45 RPM versions. However, in that case, the passage of time between issues saw enough improvements in the mastering engineer’s setup to offset the 45 RPM discs’ natural advantages.
Then, of course, there is oftentimes the “silk purse” factor. Flawed recordings will still come out sounding flawed, no matter how skilled the mastering engineer, no matter how virgin the vinyl. We can all think of recordings being re-issued with all the high-end re-issue trappings that still show their sow’s ear recording roots.
But, that isn’t the case here. Duke Ellington’s Indigos is an exceptional recording. The session was taped in 1957 at Columbia’s 30th Street Studios, by recording engineers Fred Plaut and Frank Laico, engineering royalty where peerage depends on skill and talent rather than a musty blood line. Before the internet changed the way we collect records, collectors scoured the bins for the cream of the golden age jazz recordings, including Kind Of Blue, Take Five and Indigos. Stereo or mono, these would be scooped up to find the ultimate best pressed version. The Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck titles, as long as they bore the “6 eye” original labels, commanded crazy prices. Ellington Indigos originals, on the other hand, never brought the soaring used record prices of KOB or Take Five, even if audiophile collectors knew it was vinyl gold.
This tempered level of demand for the Ellington title was reflected in the re-issue market. Both KOB and Time Out have been re-issued in hundreds of versions and both titles have been remastered by several audiophile labels—repeatedly. Indigos, on the other hand, has been released in less than 70 versions, and only Impex has given it the deluxe treatment. The relative obscurity of the recording, compared to its two contemporaries, can be summed up as follows. While KOB and Time Out rank as among the best of their leaders’ output, Indigos, as outstanding as it is, does not stand in the top rank (at least musically) of Ellington’s recorded legacy. And, in today’s digital world, ranking has an enormous impact on the demand for a record.
Before jazz criticism became trapped in the World Wide Web, any discussion of Ellington’s recordings had to allocate word count to the best and most representative of his dozens of recordings. The basic jazz overviews before the internet (including Len Lyons’ The 101 Best Jazz Albums; Tom Piazza’s The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz; and at the dawn of the digital age, Ben Ratliff’s 2002 NYT Essential Jazz) either passed over Indigos or mentioned the title without “ranking” it. The closest analog to today’s digital guides was The Penguin Guide to Jazz.
