The Far East Suite

The Far East Suite is an album by Duke Ellington and his orchestra, recorded in New York City on 19 December to 21 December 1966. The nine compositions on the original album were all composed by Ellington and Billy Strayhorn (except for one by Ellington); a 1995 reissue added four previously unreleased alternative takes. In 2003, Bluebird Records issued the album as a Digipak CD with additional bonus takes.

Background

The album's title is something of a misnomer: as Richard Cook and Brian Morton have noted, "it really should have been The Near East Suite." Strictly speaking, only one track – "Ad Lib on Nippon", inspired by a 1964 tour of Japan – is concerned with a country in the "Far East". The rest of the music on the album was inspired by a world tour undertaken by Ellington and his orchestra in 1963, which took in Beirut, Amman, Kabul, New Delhi, Sri Lanka, Tehran, Madras, Mumbai, Baghdad, and Cairo (visits to Istanbul, Nicosia, Cairo, Alexandria, Athens, and Thessaloniki were postponed when the news of the assassination of John F. Kennedy reached the tour party).

Far East

The Far East is an alternate geographical term in English (with equivalents in many other languages – see the infobox on the right for examples), that usually refers to East Asia (including Northeast Asia), the Russian Far East (part of North Asia), and Southeast Asia.South Asia is sometimes also included for economic and cultural reasons.

Since the 1960s, East Asia has become the most common term for the region in international mass media outlets. Far East is often deprecated as archaic, offensive, and sometimes even racist. In 2010, The Economist commented:

In other words, "Far East" is inherently Eurocentric because it is part of a geographical paradigms in which even Western Asia is the "Near East" or "Middle East". Until the end of the 20th century, it could be argued that Europe was the "center of gravity" of the global economy, although even that is no longer true.

The term Far East came into use in European geopolitical discourse in the 12th century, denoting the Far East as the "farthest" of the three "easts", beyond the Near East and the Middle East. For the same reason, Chinese people in the 19th and early 20th centuries called Western countries "Tàixī (泰西)"—i.e. anything further west than the Arab world.

The Far East (periodical)

The Far East was a newsmagazine published by J. R. Black in Yokohama, Japan between 1870 and 1878. The periodical was illustrated with original, pasted-in photographs, at a time when photomechanical reproduction was still in its infancy. During its run, The Far East published approximately 750 photographs, mostly of Japan and China, by at least 20 different photographers.

Before J. R. Black began publication of The Far East, he had been partner in and editor of the Japan Herald, the first English-language newspaper in Japan. When that newspaper declared bankruptcy in 1867, Black founded his own newspaper, the Japan Gazette, which offered coverage of the reform movements of the Bakumatsu. He then founded The Far East, in 1870, with a view to promoting "goodwill and brotherhood between the outer world and the subjects of the most ancient imperial dynasty of the world". The first issue appeared on 30 May 1870.

The in-house photographer for The Far East was the Austrian, Michael Moser, but Black, an amateur photographer himself, supplemented Moser's images with his own. Significant photographers whose work also appeared in the newspaper included Uchida Kuichi, the elder Suzuki Shin'ichi, and William Saunders.

Far

Far or FAR may refer to:

Organizations

Science, technology, and medicine

Transportation

Television, film, literature, and music

Far`

Far` is a village in Al Madinah Province, in western Saudi Arabia.

References

The Sun Is Often Out

The Sun Is Often Out (stylized as THE SUN iS OfTEN oUT) is the debut album by Longpigs, released in 1996 on U2's record label, Mother Records.

Track listing

All songs written by Crispin Hunt except where noted.

Personnel

Longpigs

Additional personnel

References

External links