The Mooche - The Duke Ellington Orch. 1990 

Because audiences need a show and most people weaned on television and what's been pop music now for 60 or more years often can't even appreciate what a good musician or band is most of the time; they need singers to sing their way through what's usually some sappy or vacuous if not obscene lyric fit for adolescents that audiences can relate to or some other kind of distraction (usually visual), rather than just close their eyes and go on an adventure in sound with their ears. The arrangement was written by the trumpet player Barrie Lee Hall, who wrote a lot of arrangements fit for Duke's last band in the 70's that are relevant adaptations of, and pay homage to, some of Ellington's earliest pieces and notable works from the 1920s and 1930s. Through the decades, Ellington often retired many things in the band's repertoire when certain musicians quit the band (or died), but Mercer was keen to dust off and reinvigorate what were a lot of acknowledged "classics" that his father (and others) had written that were long put away; it also took the strain of constantly composing and arranging for the day-to-day work of the band off his aging father. Mercer's return to the fold also brought his focus toward running the band as it's day-to-day business manager (taking that stress off his father too), and he ultimately inherited shoes that no person could fit into when his father passed away in 1974. But at least we're lucky to have some videos to be able to hear as far as things got for the posthumous Ellington Orchestra and how uniquely wonderful it could be right to the end, proving no need for singers or other unnecessary distractions trying to steal the spotlight from that gloriously unorthodox "Ellington sound" that needs nothing else to enhance it...