Quest for the Moment: The Audio Production of Ellington at Newport
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Published:March 2024
Chapter 3 focuses on Duke Ellington’s celebrated recording from the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival and the invasive yet reparative post-production of Columbia producer George Avakian. Creating jazz history on record necessitated a collaboration among artists, festival organizers, sound engineers, and producers—each were differently invested in the cultural politics that made jazz’s circulation possible. Through Ellington’s LP, this chapter examines how recording jazz in spaces of elite white culture and the expanded possibilities of postproduction helped create a white, mainstream audience for jazz in the mid-1950s. This chapter situates Avakian’s mediation and Ellington’s performance within scholarly discussions of “liveness” to lay the groundwork for understanding the wider stakes of audio production choices in the early LP era.
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