I conducted the recording in Los Angeles some weeks after the première performed by Walter Hendl and the New York Philharmonic. All that I remember of my recording session was the smoke in the studio. When the musicians did not blow horns they blew smoke, and of such tangibility that the atmosphere looked like Pernod clouded by water. Their instrumental mastery was astonishing, but so was their lack of solfeggio. Of the four pieces you name, I like Ebony Concerto best, though it is remote from me now, like the work of a sympathetic colleague I once knew well.