Duke Ellington was back in Manhattan last week, and jazz fans went to look him over at Café Society. The glad word from that echoing Greenwich Village cellar was: the Duke is riding high again. He displays a growing habit of holding earnest conversations with onlookers while playing the piano, and of even leaving the bandstand and meandering back just in time to give the final cutoff. But his band is practically reborn.
The five saxes play with savage bite or else hum in their eerie, split harmonies behind a pagan trumpet solo; the three trombones clip off their own high-swinging ensemble...
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