Nina Simone - Sings Ellington! - CD - New

The repertoire played in Nina Simone Sings Ellington! is strange in and of itself. While some songs are among Ellington’s best-known standards, like “Do Nothin’ Till You Hear From Me”, “Solitude”, “Satin Doll”, “Something to Live For”, and “It Don’t Mean a Thing”, others are truly obscure. “Hey, Buddy Bolden” and “You Better Know It”, come from the 1956 play A Drum Is a Woman, while “I Like the Sunrise” originated as part of the 1947 Liberian Suite. “The Gal From Joe’s” (first recorded by Duke in 1938) was a tune which nearly disappeared from his repertoire after 1940. More intriguing is “Merry Mending”, a composition listed in Ellington’s autobiography Music Is My Mistress but which Duke (one of the most prolifically recorded jazz artists) apparently never recorded himself.