The Feeling of Jazz is a composition credited to Duke Ellington, Bobby Troup, and George T. Simon, recorded in September 1962 and released on the 1963 Impulse! album Duke Ellington and John Coltrane. Bobby Troup was a songwriter and entertainer best known for the standard Route 66, while George T. Simon was a prominent music journalist and author who wrote extensively about the big band era. The three-way collaboration produced a relaxed, swinging piece that lives up to its evocative title, capturing an easygoing essence of jazz expression. The composition provides a comfortable framework for improvisation, with a melody that is accessible and warmly toned, well suited to the intimate small-group setting of the Ellington-Coltrane sessions. The tune exemplifies the kind of straightforward, unpretentious writing that allows soloists room to stretch out and develop their ideas at a leisurely pace. Within the context of the album, The Feeling of Jazz serves as one of the more relaxed and genial tracks, contrasting with the more harmonically searching pieces from the sessions. Like several other tunes from the collaboration, it was composed or selected specifically for this recording date and has remained closely associated with the album rather than entering the wider jazz repertoire as an independently performed standard. The piece stands as a testament to the ease and mutual respect that characterized the Ellington-Coltrane partnership.
