Ellington's last European tour for Norman Granz had him sharing the bill with Ella Fitzgerald, but (apart from a long-gone Italian bootleg) the present German TVrecording seems to be the first public release of anything from this tour. Wisely for collectors, the CD omits the “medley of hits” and a couple of other familiar items from the Stuttgart programme, and concentrates mainly on then-new material. Some items indeed were so new they hadn’t even acquired their now well-known names, with ‘Mount Harissa’ here called ‘Knob Hill’ (which should be ‘Nob Hill’, as in San Francisco and on the original music-sheets) while Strayhorn's ‘Blood Count’, first rehearsed on-tour just nine days before this concert, was then titled ‘Freakish Lights’. Also fairly new were the splendid ‘La Plus Belle Africaine’, whose superior “official” Verve version was not yet released, and Cootie's feature ‘The Shepherd’, subsequently incorporated in Duke's Second Sacred Concert. Other pieces didn’t stay in the repertoire, so it's good to have ‘Swamp Goo’ (starring Procope) and ‘A Chromatic Love Affair’ (Carney). Though less than essential, “good to have” applies to the entire well-recorded album.