Ella Fitzgerald

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Essential Albums

  • Best of the Songbooks: The Collection
    Best of the Songbooks: The Collection
    Best of the Songbooks: The Collection

    1996

  • Ella Wishes You A Swinging Christmas (Expanded Edition)
    Ella Wishes You A Swinging Christmas (Expanded Edition)
    Ella Wishes You A Swinging Christmas (Expanded Edition)

    1960

  • Porgy and Bess
    Porgy and Bess
    Porgy and Bess

    Producer Norman Granz recorded these singular American talents for Verve in 1956 (Ella & Louis) and 1957 (Ella & Louis Again) before he landed this absolute stunner of a double album. Recorded just months after Ella & Louis Again, Porgy & Bess also preceded Fitzgerald’s Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Songbook of 1959 (with arranger/conductor Nelson Riddle). It’s a vital addition to Fitzgerald’s Verve songbook recordings, offering an extended look at a particular slice of Gershwin, one that has proven attractive to a great many jazz artists. (Miles Davis and Gil Evans released their own, radically different Porgy and Bess in March 1959.) Ella and Pops convey a deep emotional connection to the story of what Gershwin called his “folk opera”, with Russell Garcia’s evocative and swinging large-ensemble arrangements framing their utterly dissimilar yet highly complementary voices. The reception history of Gershwin’s ambitious venture (which premiered in 1935, two years before the composer’s death at 38) is extremely complex, as it must be when a celebrated white composer attempts a tableau of African American life in the distinctly African American vernacular of blues and jazz. Black composers including Scott Joplin strove to create a distinctly American “folk opera” medium decades before Gershwin, but received little recognition. And even in the ’30s, Porgy and Bess was criticised for furthering damaging stereotypes. Armstrong, often wrongly accused of being soft on racism and civil rights, had his own painful struggle against accusations of “tomming”. Hearing him in this context inevitably raises these issues. But the music itself, in its sheer rapturous beauty, transcends them. Armstrong’s trumpet is a thing of jewel-like melodic perfection on the initial chorus of “I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’”, as is Fitzgerald’s delivery of the song’s triumphant lyric “I am glad I’m alive.” Armstrong opens “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” with a heartbreaking out-of-tempo vocal, answered by Fitzgerald’s confident glide into tempo on the words “Porgy, I’s your woman now.” Her nuanced expression on the rhyming phrase “There’s no wrinkle on my brow” is sent down from the heavens. Armstrong gives a masterclass on swing, the feel he essentially invented back in the ’20s, in his vocal solo feature on “A Woman Is a Sometime Thing”. And Fitzgerald’s solo ballad “I Wants to Stay Here” (a.k.a. “I Loves You, Porgy”) is simply breathtaking. “My Man’s Gone Now” and the interludes “Buzzard Song” and “Oh, Doctor Jesus” are haunting, even unsettling, uncharacteristically so for the First Lady of Song. These elements and more make Porgy & Bess one of the great vocal albums of the era, and arguably of all time.

  • Ella and Louis
    Ella and Louis
    Ella and Louis

    Ella Fitzgerald was early in her historic run on Norman Granz’s Verve label when she was paired up with the great Louis Armstrong in the summer of 1956 for Ella and Louis. Their Porgy & Bess album followed soon after, as did Ella and Louis Again (all of it collected on The Complete Ella and Louis on Verve). The alchemy between the two giants is a marvel in the annals of American song. They take a simple approach that essentially can’t go wrong: beautiful expressive standards, uncluttered arrangements, virtuoso small-group backing from pianist Oscar Peterson’s working unit with bassist Ray Brown and guitarist Herb Ellis—plus Buddy Rich on drums, as exquisitely delicate as you’ll ever hear him. Taking separate choruses or harmonising in vivacious and perfectly timed call-and-response (with Armstrong on trumpet and voice), the partners casually arrive at version after definitive version of these adored songs, pouring themselves equally into shimmering ballads (“Moonlight in Vermont”, “Stars Fell on Alabama”) and levitating midtempo swingers (“Can’t We Be Friends”, “Under a Blanket of Blue”). Fitzgerald’s masterful Armstrong impression in the last phrase of “Tenderly” captures the fun of it all.

  • Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook (Expanded Edition)
    Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook (Expanded Edition)
    Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook (Expanded Edition)

    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. 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. 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. Granz knew she possessed greater versatility, and with the Verve songbooks he sought to connect her to the widest possible audience. Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook was the first of what would be eight albums in this vein, each devoted to a single composer. Porter would be followed by Rodgers & Hart, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern and finally Johnny Mercer in 1964. Most of these writers, save for Porter and Berlin, had lyricist partners (Mercer was primarily known as a lyricist, not a composer). 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”). 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). 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. 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. 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.

  • Lullabies of Birdland
    Lullabies of Birdland
    Lullabies of Birdland

    1955

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About Ella Fitzgerald

Among the most essential vocalists in popular music, Ella Fitzgerald bridged the spheres of jazz and pop with her sophisticated and expressive style for six decades. Born in 1917 in Virginia and raised in Yonkers, New York, she drew inspiration from Methodist church singing as well as from pop crooners like Bing Crosby and Connie Boswell. After winning a contest at the Apollo in 1934, Fitzgerald began her storied career by fronting Chick Webb’s dance band, gaining a reputation for her nuanced swing phrasing and stunning technical acumen. Her swaggering setting of “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” announced her in the popular sphere in 1938. In the ’40s and ’50s, she delved into pop while exploring the nascent bebop style in collaborations with Dizzy Gillepsie, Ray Brown and other progressive jazz luminaries, helping to expand the field of scat singing. Beginning with 1956’s Cole Porter collection, her lushly orchestrated songbook albums for Verve and her joint LPs with Louis Armstrong remain perhaps her most enduring and revered recordings. After recording into the final decade of her life, Fitzgerald died in 1996.

BORN
25 April 1917
GENRE
Jazz

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