By rights, January should be Black, Brown and Beige Month. Duke Ellington's chef-d'oeuvre was first performed publicly in this month, 1943. It was given its première on 23 January, 1943 at Carnegie Hall.
I recently discovered, courtesy of Discogs that in November 2000, the French JAZZ Magazine issued a free CD of just the B,B and B portion of the Carnegie evening. A good idea - and not sure why no-one thought of it before.
I have ordered a copy of the disc and await its arrival. I'm assuming it's a straight copy of the version issued by Prestige. This would be a shame partly because the transfer from LP to CD on the Prestige label was not done well - the LP was much better but also mainly because the version which appears on Prestige is a 'cut and paste' from two different performances, borrowing parts from the performance five days later at Symphony Hall, Boston, Massachusetts. I do not think (leave a comment if I'm wrong about this) the suite was ever performed live again, complete, in Ellington's lifetime.
The chequered history of the releases of this live concert are evident in the link to Brian Koller's excellent discography here.
What we really need is a sympathetically restored and remastered edition which releases the Carnegie Hall concert version whole for the first time and a complete version of the Symphony Hall concert also. We can dream!
Here is a scan of the relevant pages (a subscription coupon has been clipped from the copy I have) from JAZZ Magazine (click on the images to enlarge):
Some day soon, I must type up a version and put through Google Translate to compensate for my schoolboy-level of French.
I will also type up the notes from the original issue of the truncated studio version released by RCA Victor. Those can be read clearly on the following images taken from an auction for the hard bound set was recently for sale on eBay. Import charges stopped me putting in a bid for this copy!
And finally, an interesting article on B,B and B I found recently may be read here.
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