At the end of World War II Duke Ellington was coming off one of the most commercially and artistically successful periods of his career--the so-called Blanton-Webster years of the early 1940s. He had managed to keep much of his orchestra intact during the war and had maintained a high public profile with concerts and broadcasts during the 1943-44 recording ban that kept him and other artists out of the studios. In late 1944 he'd scored a smash hit with “I'm Beginning to See the Light"...and with service men and women beginning to return home as the war wound down in 1945, it seemed that the big bands would keep riding the wave of popularity that had sustained them since the mid-1930s.
