In 2022, the album was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Recording Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Following the Festival suite, Duke called for Harry Carney's baritone saxophone performance of "Sophisticated Lady".

Ellington had been experimenting with the reworking for several years before the Newport performance; a release of one of his Carnegie Hall concerts of the 1940s presented the two old blues joined by a wordless vocal passage, "Transbluecency," but in time he chose to join the pair by a saxophone solo, handing it to Gonsalves, experimenting with it in shorter performances before the Newport show, where Ellington is believed to have told Gonsalves to blow as long as he felt like blowing when the solo slot came.

The previous experiments culminated in a 27-chorus solo by Gonsalves — simple, but powerful — backed only by bassist Jimmy Woode, drummer Sam Woodyard, and Ellington himself pounding punctuating piano chords and (with several audible band members as well) hollering urgings-on ("Come on, Paul — dig in!

Duke's best known alto saxophonist then played two of his most famous numbers in "I Got It Bad (and That Ain't Good)" followed by "Jeep's Blues".

Some of his most critically acclaimed albums occurred during the next decade and a half, until age and illness began to claim some of Duke's band members and, in 1974, Ellington himself.

In 1996, a tape discovered in the Voice of America's archive of its radio broadcasts revealed that the 1956 album had indeed been fabricated with studio performances mixed with some live recordings and artificial applause.

Producer George Avakian did as Ellington asked and the band entered the studio immediately after the festival.

The applause was dubbed onto the original release to cover up the fact that Gonsalves had been playing into the wrong microphone and was often completely inaudible.

On the 1999 reissue, the Voice of America live recording and live Columbia tapes were painstakingly pieced together using digital technology to create a stereophonic recording of the best-known Ellington performance of the past 50 years, this time with Gonsalves' solo clearly heard, though the beginning of the audience cheering and noise at around the seventh or eighth chorus of the solo can still be heard as well.