What a score! Here's a promotional short for Irving Mills' Master and Variety labels that shows us Ellington in the studio. Amazingly, the process of record manufacture hasn't changed substantially since 1937.
BTW, in Music Is My Mistress, Ellington devoted a chapter to Mills. IIRC, it consisted of the following sentence: "My mother told me that if you can't say something nice about somebody, say nothing."
