Afro-Bossa

This album was a major shift; it presaged the key later Ellington works, the best of which deal in globalist musical motifs in much the way he had previously done with “jungle” ones. Ellington spent much of the fifties and sixties locked into recording deals that called for rehashes of his older music in equal measure with recordings of new work: the Afro-Bossa sessions wrapped around those of Memories of the Big Band Era. (The re-recordings sold two or three times as much as the new stuff.) The latter has its moments, but you can hear the Orchestra breathing free and breaking away here. “Caline (Silk Lace)” is all friskiness and rakish charm; the title track proved Ellington and Strayhorn could arrange percussion with the same suave density as they could horns.