Recorded between the Ellington Songbook with Ella and the Perfume Suite, this catches the band in a purple patch. Though writers tend not to divide the Ellington oeuvre into ‘new’ and ‘old’ testament periods like Basie, this is the acme of what one might think of as the ‘new’ testament period, with Jimmy Woode and Sam Woodyard on bass and drums being by this time as established a team as Wellman Bruad and Sonny Greer had been in the early band. The idea of the album (originally on Columbia) was to revisit plenty of the band's own repertoire, but also to interpret standards such as ‘Night and Day’ or ‘All The Things You Are’ in a comparable manner. For the most part, the tempi are relaxed dancehall speeds, ideal for what Danny Barker described as jazz's function of offering dancers the opportunity of ‘a little belly rubbing’, but this also offers the soloists an opportunity to shine. Jimmy Hamilton's clarinet, for instance, seldom sounded so good as on a measured ‘Tenderly’, and it is an equally brilliant touch to revisit ‘Mood Indigo’, the track that inspired the title as a vehicle for Willie Cook. Gonsalves fans will treasure a breathy ‘Where or When’. Six alternate takes give an insight into how this compilation of Duke at his most laidback came about, and overall it is a welcome opportunity to reassess an album that tends to be overlooked, just because almost everything else the band touched at this period was so uniformly excellent.