The Far East Suite
| The Far East Suite | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Studio album by Duke Ellington | ||||
| Released | 1967 | |||
| Recorded | December 1966 | |||
| Genre | Jazz | |||
| Length | 60:54 | |||
| Label | Bluebird/RCA | |||
| Producer | Brad McKuen | |||
| Duke Ellington chronology | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic |   |
| Penguin Guide to Jazz | |
The Far East Suite is an album by Duke Ellington and his orchestra, recorded in New York City on 19 December to 21 December 1966. The nine compositions on the original album were all composed by Ellington and Billy Strayhorn (except for one by Ellington); a 1995 reissue added four previously unreleased alternative takes. In 2003, Bluebird Records issued the album as a Digipak CD with additional bonus takes.
Strayhorn died in May, 1967, making The Far East Suite the final album to feature his compositions that was released during his life.
The album's title is something of a misnomer: as critics Richard Cook and Brian Morton have noted, "it really should have been The Near East Suite." Strictly speaking, only one track – "Ad Lib on Nippon", inspired by a 1964 tour of Japan – is concerned with a country in the "Far East". The rest of the music on the album was inspired by a world tour undertaken by Ellington and his orchestra in 1963, which included performances in Damascus, Amman, Ramall'ah, Kabul, New Delhi, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Madras (now Chennai), Bombay (now Mumbai), Calcutta, Columbo, Kandy, Dacca, Lahore, Karachi, Tehran, Isfahan, Abadan, Baghdad, and Beirut. The band arrived in Ankara but U.S.President John F Kennedy was assassinated the day before its concert, and the State Department cancelled the tour. Scheduled performances in Istanbul, Nicosia, Cairo, Alexandria, Athens and Thessaloniki and a week added to the tour for Yugoslavia were cancelled.
In early 1964, while on tour in England, Ellington and Strayhorn performed four pieces of music for the first time ("Mynah", "Depk", "Agra", and "Amad"), which they called "Expressions of the Far East". By the time of the recording sessions in late 1966 Ellington and Strayhorn had added four more pieces. One, the latter's "Isfahan" was formerly known as "Elf", and had in fact been written months prior to the 1963 tour.
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