Ella fitzgerald cole porter songbook8/9/2023 The success of the album cued a tour and Ella began playing at clubs throughout the US – previously wherein the only black people were cleaners, not the stars of the headline act. Her strengths in the technique of scat were well recognized within the jazz community, yet her dedication to this style of music was inhibiting her from reaching a wider audience and a voice like Ella's was deserving of universal recognition.Įlla Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook was released in 1956. She had been playing the small jazz club circuit, devoting her voice to bee bop. This record has not just been significant to me however.Įlla reportedly remarked that this album was a turning point in her career. Well why not? It's been vital to me throughout certain times in my life, and this is one of those records that will always provide that feeling. This time however, it instead transposed to a summer in the city, where there was whiskey and wisecracks, romance and mornings that arrive all too soon. Hence upon rediscovering this album a few years later, it sound-tracked my daydreams and triggered a nostalgic mood that had earlier taken me out of adolescent tedium. We shared a secret, a playful wink, a sing-along, and perhaps even a dance. Through this album, Ella seemingly extended an invitation to somewhere better and I took it. There was a bigger-picture consideration as well, which Friedwald notes: “As the album format became more and more important to the music business, Fitzgerald was perfectly poised to assume her position as queen of the long-playing disc.” It was Norman Granz, Fitzgerald’s manager long after he sold Verve to MGM in 1960, who helped put her there.At my request, Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook was on regular rotation at my house when I was a kid in the 90's. Still, Buddy Bregman’s Porter arrangements have their charm the band features Bud Shank, Barney Kessel, Harry “Sweets” Edison, Maynard Ferguson, and other top talent. Will Friedwald, in A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers, argues that the first two Ella songbooks, Porter and Rodgers & Hart, suffer in comparison to those arranged by Nelson Riddle. Fitzgerald nails the delivery and the fun in all of it, but also captures the tragedy and pervasive unease of a song like “Miss Otis Regrets” (played in duet with session pianist Paul Smith). So the Porter songbook attests not only to his timeless melodies and creative, often elongated song forms (“In the Still of the Night,” “Begin the Beguine”), but also to his peerless wordplay and wit (“Too Darn Hot,” “You’re the Top,” “Always True to You in My Fashion”). Most of these writers, save for Porter and Berlin, had lyricist partners (Mercer was primarily known as a lyricist, not a composer). Porter would be followed by Rodgers & Hart, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, and finally Johnny Mercer in 1964. Granz knew she possessed greater versatility, and with the Verve songbooks he sought to connect her to the widest possible audience.Įlla Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook was the first of what would be eight albums in this vein, each devoted to a single composer. Jazz connoisseurs admired her for her solid swing feel and breakneck scatting, her ability to go head-to-head onstage with the era's great soloists. Right away the plan was to position her as a singer with a command of the American pop songbook, on par with a figure like Sinatra. Ella Fitzgerald, a star of Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic concert series since 1949, seemed to Granz an ideal fit for his new Verve label, so he signed her in 1955, luring her away from Decca in something of a coup.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |