The core of this chapter is the general acceptance that Ellington's appearance at Newport in 1956 somehow 'relaunched' the Ellington band. With contributions from those who were there, Shipton re-explores both the Newport myth and re-examines the early 1950s output of the band. He looks at its Carnegie Hall concerts, discusses the line up when Willie Smith, Juan Tizol and Louis Bellson joined from Harry James, and gives detailed examples of the music the band produced in its alleged 'shallow' period, prompting a re-examination of the clains made for the Newport appearance by producer George Avakian.

In his essay “The Golden Age: Time Past,” Ralph Ellison does not disguise his distaste either for bebop music or for “the sharp, ugly…rebellion” bop’s pioneers were waging against the formal conventions of folk jazz and the Blues. Rather than conclude, as Robert O’Meally does, that Ellison was “deaf to virtually all jazz beyond Basie and Ellington,” this chapter re-contextualizes Ellison’s criticism of bebop an extension of his philosophy of temporality. Ellison believed that one’s experience of time determined one’s understanding of history, and bebop, which formalizes a discontinuous sense of time, clashed with his durational view of the past and its bearing on the present.