Tag: ververecords

Ella Fitzgerald, Sings the Irving Berlin Song Book (Vol. 1)

Album of the Week, November 11, 2023

My hometown of Newport News, Virginia remembers Ella Fitzgerald as perhaps its most famous native daughter, naming a middle school, auditorium, street, and music festival after her. But there is little physical evidence of her presence in the city. The house where she spent the first three years of her life stood at 2050 Madison Avenue, but no longer appears to stand there, and there is no historical marker; the mural dedicated to Fitzgerald stands a block away. Fitzgerald made her way with her family to New York, and ultimately made her mark in Harlem and on the circuit.

Composer and lyricist Irving Berlin made a similar pilgrimage. Born Israel Beilin in Tyumen, Siberia in 1888 and raised in the shtetl of Tolochin in Belarus, Berlin’s sole memory of his first five years in Russia was watching his family house burn to the ground. The family emigrated to escape the poverty, discrimination and pogroms of Imperial Russia, sailing through Antwerp on the Red Star Line and arriving at Ellis Island in September 1893, where their name was naturalized to Baline. Life in the city was crowded and it was hard for him to make money as a newsboy, so he left the family apartment and moved into a Lower East Side lodging house.

Berlin worked as a singing waiter and a song plugger, taught himself to play piano after hours at the Pelham Cafe in Chinatown, and published his first song. Moving to Jimmy Kelly’s in Union Square, he began collaborating with other young songwriters and got a big break as a staff lyricist for the Ted Snyder Company. He began publishing works with his own music as well as lyrics, and in 1910 wrote his first big hit, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” The song was a lasting hit, earning him spotlights at vaudeville shows and climbing the charts to Number 1 a dozen times in its first fifty years of publication. Gershwin called it “the first real American musical work,” and Berlin decided to continue to follow the model. He soon broke away from ragtime and began writing more complex melodies and ballads, as well as revues and Broadway shows. By the time that Fitzgerald began performing in the 1930s, Berlin was more than twenty years into a successful career as a songwriter, and his songs were like oxygen in the atmosphere.

The performances that Ella delivers on Sings the Irving Berlin Song Book (or at least in Volume 1, which is the record that I have in my collection) mostly hew to the sophisticated, rather than the raggy, side of the line, thanks in part to Paul Weston’s subtle orchestration. Indeed, the opening performance of “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” might just be the definitive version of a song that was premiered by Fred Astaire (in the film Follow the Fleet) and famously performed by Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Mel Tormé, and others. (We’ll get to a modern-day performance of the song in a later post.) Ella’s version starts out somber rather than swinging, but then kicks into high gear as the chorus pivots from minor to major. Ella’s voice similarly starts in a low contralto range but climbs as the the song swings into the major key, ultimately sounding a triumphant note as the “dance” section ends, performed by a jazz trio rather than the full orchestra.

There are a few performances on the record where exuberance is uncolored by regret. Ella’s version of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” is one, with what sounds like a full Dixieland band swinging hard behind her. “Top Hat, White Tie, And Tails” is the rhythmic cousin to “Puttin’ On the Ritz,” with both finding Berlin with a keen interest in American sartorial splendor and in splendid syncopation.

The great “Cheek to Cheek,” which like “Top Hat” appeared for the first time in Berlin’s movie musical Top Hat and was premiered by Fred Astaire, gets a gentle cha-cha rhythm here, And “I Used to Be Color Blind” is that rare thing on the record, a purely lovely love song.

On the purely melancholic side, “Russian Lullaby” expresses the immigrant’s remembered anxiety in his homeland, with the words, “Just a little plaintive tune/When baby starts to cry/Rock-a-bye my baby/Somewhere there may be/A land that’s free for you and me” forming almost the entirety of the song. “How Deep is the Ocean” mingles an expression of undying love with an unusual rhetorical device—the entire song takes the form of questions, save for one line, “I’ll tell you no lie.” It’s a devastatingly subtle example of the depth of Berlin’s songwriting throughout the album.

The Irving Berlin Song Book was the fourth installment in Ella’s Song Book series; released in 1958, it followed Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hart, and Duke Ellington. She would record four more entries in the series, releasing volumes devoted to the music of George and Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, and Johnny Mercer, before leaving Verve in 1966 for Capitol Records, then for Reprise. Along the way she recorded a slew of other classic records, including her famed Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas! and my personal favorite, the underrated Ella, on which she covered songs by Smokey Robinson, Randy Newman, Bacharach/David, and the Beatles. (Yes, really.) She performed well into her 70s, finally retiring three years before her death in 1996. Her influence as a trailblazer for jazz singers, female performers, and serious interpreters of the Great American Song Book remains a lasting testimony to her greatness. The great female jazz singers who followed Ella, indeed, either had to sing in her shadow or find radically different performing voices. We’ll listen to someone in the latter camp next time.

You can listen to the full two-volume set of the Irving Berlin Song Book here:

Ella Fitzgerald, Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers and Hart Song Book (Vol. 2)

Ella produces unhurried, definitive versions of songs from the Great American Songbook.

Album of the Week, November 4, 2023

If you say “female jazz singer,” odds are you think about today’s artist. We’ve covered a few of her recordings before, but today we dig into one of the recordings that led to her towering reputation—her surveys of the Great American Song Book.

Ella Fitzgerald was born in Newport News, Virginia, almost exactly eleven months before Pearl Bailey, and she spent the first two and a half years of her life there, near the great coal port that had been built by Collis P. Huntington. Her mother and her new partner moved with Ella to Yonkers in Westchester County, New York. An excellent student, her grades began to suffer after her mother’s death of injuries sustained in a car crash. She moved to her aunt’s in Harlem and took a series of odd jobs, including lookout at a bordello and a numbers runner. She was caught by the police and placed in a series of reform schools.

In 1933 and 1934, she began singing on the street, and in 1934 she won first prize at one of the earliest Amateur Nights at the Apollo Theatre. Like Pearl Bailey, she never was able to perform the week-long engagement that formed part of that earliest award, but later won a gig at the Harlem Opera House. In late 1935 she met bandleader Chick Webb and joined his band for their performances at the Savoy Theatre in Harlem. She recorded several hit songs, becoming best known for “A Tisket, A-Tasket.” When Webb died of spinal tuberculosis in 1939, she took on his band, which became known as Ella Fitzgerald and Her Famous Orchestra.

By 1942 the band had grown difficult to maintain, and she took on solo work, eventually learning (and evolving) scat singing while performing with Dizzy Gillespie and revolutionizing the art of vocal jazz in the process. She recorded for Decca during this period. When she began appearing at Norman Granz’s “Jazz at the Philharmonic” series, he convinced her to leave Decca for a new label he would found with her at the center, and thus Verve Records was created. At Verve, with be-bop flagging and audiences shifting, she and Granz created the Songbook series as a way to give her a more serious outlet for her voice. In the series, which consisted of recordings dedicated to songwriters or lyricists, she and Granz essentially memorialized the concept of the Great American Songbook, recording definitive versions of many of the twentieth century’s great songs.

Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers and Hart Song Book, released in 1956, was the second entrant in the series, and follows the formula. Across two volumes, she recorded the greatest songs by the duo, in arrangements by a great arranger and bandleader, in this case Buddy Bregman. I’ll be reviewing the second volume today since that’s the one that washed up in my local used record store.

I listened to today’s record while driving around with my daughter, who knows Ella’s voice by ear but has mostly heard the Christmas album. After a few seconds of the chorus of “Give It Back to the Indians,” she asked, “Um, when was this recorded?” When I told her the record dates to 1956, she said, “Ah, that explains it.” The original context, in the 1939 musical Too Many Girls, doesn’t really help explain why we’re singing about Peter Minuit swindling the Lenape tribe out of the island of Manhattan. But the song itself is a great exasperated shout out to the charms and frustrations of New York.

Some of the songs on the album live up to Lorenz Hart’s reputation as one of the most depressed lyricists around. “Ten Cents a Dance” and its evocation of the desperation of poverty, the inability to escape at the low rate of ten cents a dance, and especially the inability to escape her undesirable beaus, might be the emotional low point. Others, like “Ev’rything I’ve Got,” just feel manic. The latter, coming (like June Christy’s “Nobody’s Heart”) from By Jupiter, is a battle-of-the sexes song with these mind-boggling lines:

I have eyes for you to give you dirty looks
I have words that do not come from children’s books
There’s a trick with a knife I’m learning to do
And ev’rything I’ve got belongs to you
I’ve a powerful anesthesia in my fist
And the perfect wrist to give your neck atwist
There are hammerlock holds
I’ve mastered a few
And ev’rything I’ve got belongs to you

Then of course there’s “My Funny Valentine.” One feature of the Song Books is that without fail Ella would sing the whole song, including the verses, for songs that usually in the jazz tradition only get heard as their choruses. So it is with “Valentine.” In this case, one forgives the jazz artists, as both the melody and lyrics of the verse are essentially disposable, serving only to set up the odd couple of the song’s central tragedy, or romance, or both. In Ella’s rendition, the pathos and hope of the relationship are mingled through the whole performance.

“Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” is another of the great songs, notable for its unusually suggestive lyrics, including “Vexed again, perplexed again/
Thank God, I can be oversexed again,” and “Romance, finis; your chance, finis/
Those ants that invaded my pants, finis.” Ella sings them with a mix of cool restraint, humor and simmering emotion that is simply stunning.

Not all the arrangements feature the full big band. “Wait ‘Till You See Him,” also from By Jupiter, features Ella’s voice accompanied only by a guitar. It’s brief, restrained, and utterly flawless. It leads straight into “Lover,” which is given a full big band treatment; the impression is of shock and awe. Ella’s “Lover” narrator is leaving nothing to chance.

The album closes out with “Blue Moon,” a song that went through three different sets of lyrics before becoming the standard that would later be covered by the Marcels, Elvis Presley, and the Cowboy Junkies. Here it’s a sweeping, slightly swooning ballad, with the romance cut slightly by Ella’s no-nonsense reading of the bridge: “And then there suddenly appeared before me
The only one my arms will hold.”

There are other songs on the record, but honestly this is one that just needs listening. Each performance ranks as the finest version of these great songs, and Ella just kept doing them. She would record six records in the Song Book series; we’ll hear another next week.

You can hear the full two volume version of Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers and Hart Songbook below. If you just want to hear the second volume, start at Track 18, then swap out “My Romance” for “Mountain Greenery.”

Bill Evans, At the Montreux Jazz Festival

Album of the Week, February 18, 2023

Bill Evans played in plenty of other formats than the piano trio. We first met him in this column as part of Miles Davis’ sextet. He also recorded with symphonic orchestra, backing up Herbie Mann and Don Eliott, and solo. But piano trio was by far his favorite configuration, and one can trace a lot of his development as a musician by listening to how his playing responds to changes of personnel in his trios over the years. We’ve heard some of those changes already, but none were more significant than the change of players heard on this recording.

Chuck Israels, who played bass in the trio off and on from 1962 to early 1966, was gone; his last recording (save a one-off 1975 date) with Evans was the 1966 Bill Evans at Town Hall concert. And Larry Bunker’s last recording with the trio was last week’s Trio ’65. In their places were two significant musicians who would play pivotal roles in Evans’ development.

Evans met bassist Eddie Gómez in 1966, when the latter was just 22 years old and recently graduated from Juilliard. The bassist would spend the next 11 years working with Evans, forming far and away the pianist’s longest lasting musical partnership. But Evans was to record with a rotating chair at drummer for several years, doing a few albums with Shelly Manne, another duo album with Jim Hall in the mode of Undercurrent, and a solo recording. Finally in 1968, Evans met the young drummer Jack DeJohnette, who was just coming off a celebrated stint as a member of Charles Lloyd’s quartet.

The galvanic impact that DeJohnette had on Evans’s sound can be heard from the opening tune, “One for Helen,” where the drummer’s sound seems to spur Evans to greater harmonic and rhythmic innovation. While the opening tempo and dynamic is already more extroverted than the performances on the preceding trio records, the excitement ratchets up another notch with the entrances of Gómez and DeJohnette. For one thing, the drummer’s fills are noticeable here, instead of genteelly blending in as did Motian’s, with small explosions on cymbal or snare bursting from the line from time to time. Gómez gets a lion’s share of the excitement, though, with a bass solo that manages to be both melodic and percussive at once. When Evans re-enters, he’s recharged, playing rhythmic variations back to back into the close of the tune.

“A Sleepin’ Bee” retains some of the introspective hush of the performance on Trio 64, but Gómez and DeJohnette enliven it with their first entrance. Gómez’s entrance neatly echoes the descending left hand line in the piano before taking voice with a countermelody, while DeJohnette drops bombs and underscores the melodic exploration with rolls, excursions on the tom, and other outbursts, all while keeping a proverbial eye on Evans. The bass solo in the back half of the track is a neat trick, being both fully metrically and harmonically aligned with Evans’ take on the tune while simultaneously opening up the sound world of the piece with different chord voicings.

Earl Zindars’ “Mother of Earl” is a quieter ballad, here given a somber introduction by Evans that gives way to a more deliberate statement of the melody, and an extended bass solo in triplets. DeJohnette’s drums are mostly limited here to atmosphere, with some gentle work on the cymbals throughout.

Where things really start to get into gear is “Nardis.” Composed by Miles, the tune found its way into Evans’ repertoire in 1958 while he was playing in Cannonball Adderley’s band. First appearing on a Bill Evans Trio record with 1961’s Explorations, it remained a highlight of his live shows for the rest of his career, and this performance is a key argument for why. The performance here ably represents the model that so many preceding and subsequent takes would follow: a “straight” reading of the chorus by the full band, followed by an extended solo, here given to Gómez. In the liner notes to the album, the bassist notes that he views his instrument as a horn, and the solo here bears that out as an extended meditation on the tune. Evans follows with his own solo, picking up the rhythmic drive of Gómez’s bass line, as splashes on the cymbals and rolls on the snare and tom pour kerosene on the fire. DeJohnette then gets his own solo and takes some of the fill devices into a free exploration of time and tonality, wringing new colors out of the drum kit and revising the melody in a sort of slow motion fog before roaring back in a blistering crash of cymbals. The band close out with a recapitulation of the melody, trying on four closing chords before running up the scale and into the applause of the audience.

“I Loves You, Porgy” finds Evans catching his proverbial breath, taking a solo exploration of the tune that is by turns introspective and extroverted. Starting about two minutes in, the free chordal explorations of the opening give way to a syncopated rhythm that seems to light up the keys under the pianist’s fingers, spurring an exploration of the tune in rhythm that lasts through most of the rest of the piece. The next track, “The Touch of Your Lips,” is in a similarly introspective mood until Gómez and DeJohnette rejoin about halfway through, when the temperature kicks up again.

“Embraceable You” is a solo feature for Gómez, who freely explores the colors and range of the bass with soft accompaniment from Evans and DeJohnette. Evoking by turns the sound of a Spanish guitar, a Miles Davis solo line, and the most swinging bass line ever played by Milt Hinton, the bassist plays a sweetly introspective version of the tune, ending with rapt applause from the Montreux festival crowd.

Evans’ version of “Someday My Prince Will Come” is far less wistful than the version we last heard from Miles’ group (with Wynton Kelly on piano). If Miles’s version is hopeful, Evans’ version is positively jubilant. Gómez takes an extended bass solo in the lower range of the instrument, and DeJohnette trades eights with Evans, until finally the band crashes through the finale and the festival crowd goes wild. Evans and company return for a romp through “Walkin’ Up” at a breakneck pace to close out, leaving the audience roaring for more.

DeJohnette wouldn’t stay long with Evans, despite the sound the trio developed (which won Evans his second Grammy award). He played with Stan Getz briefly in November 1968, and was performing with Getz’s group at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in London that month when he was discovered by Miles Davis. He went on to Miles’ band, performing alongside bassist Dave Holland in what has been dubbed the “lost” quintet, since none of that line-up’s music ever made it onto a studio recording. As for Evans, he would continue in the trio format, and we’ll hear one more outing from his trio next time.

You can listen to the album here:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0q2VleZJVEkQc1XapvN_wibv69R2XmBP

Bill Evans Trio, Trio ’65

Album of the Week, February 11, 2023

Bill Evans didn’t record much in 1964—he was too busy touring. Aside from a studio session with Stan Getz, Ron Carter (alternating with Richard Davis) and Elvin Jones, his only recorded output from the year was a session with singer Monica Zetterlund (appearing under her name as Waltz for Debby) and live sessions in California and Europe. None of those sessions included Gary Peacock, whose contributions to Evans’ catalog began and ended with Trio 64. Instead, Evans was back touring with Chuck Israels and a new drummer, Larry Bunker.

The new album, which like its predecessor was recorded in one session in New York City, on February 3, 1965, follows a similar format: all standards, no originals, and more than a few numbers that Evans had recorded before. As for the players, we’ve met Israels before; Bunker is new to this column, but not to jazz. He had one of the most varied careers of a jazz drummer ever, having appeared on records over the course of his career for (deep breath): Peggy Lee including Black Coffee, Buddy Collette, Stan Getz, Stan Kenton including A Merry Christmas!, Gary Burton, Chet Baker, Benny Carter, Clare Fischer, Woody Herman, Dizzy Gillespie, Plas Johnson, Johnny Mandel, Shelly Manne, Carmen McRae, Oliver Nelson, Paul Horn, Art Pepper, Shorty Rogers, Pete Rugolo, Bud Shank, Lalo Schifrin, Sarah Vaughan, Wendy Waldman, the Fifth Dimension including Stoned Soul Picnic, Tim Buckley on Sefronia, Linda Ronstadt, Michael Franks, Diane Schuur, Kenny Rogers, Walter Murphy, Barry Manilow, Michael Bolton, Natalie Cole, Al Jarreau, Diana Kraal, Cheryl Bentyne, Vince Gill, Robert Palmer, U2 (he is the timpani player on “Hawkmoon 269,” from Rattle & Hum), and Christina Aguilera, on My Kind of Christmas. A session drummer at heart, he nevertheless made six recordings with Evans, appearing on two Milestone sessions (Time Remembered and At Shelly’s Manne-Hole), the Zetterlund record, a live trio recording, and an odd session with symphony orchestra, in addition to Trio ’65.

The opener, “Israel,” is a fast moving modal blues that starts out swinging and then doubles down. Evans plays rapidly descending arpeggios in his first solo that are a little reminiscent of Coltrane’s “sheets of sound.” Israels takes two solo choruses, and Bunker takes a solo chorus and then trades eights for a bit with Evans, echoing some of the rhythms from the pianist’s solo along the way.

“Elsa” is a classic Bill Evans Trio ballad, with Israels leveraging the suspended note on the 5th to good effect in his introduction. The arrangement moves in a sort of shuffling waltz, with brisk patterns on Bunker’s brushes surrounding Evans and Israel’s playing like a filigree. Throughout, Israels alternates a simple underpinning of the chords with a more elaborate descending bass line that reinforces the melody, switching with Evans seemingly telepathically.

This version of “Round Midnight” plays the much-loved and oft-played Thelonious Monk standard in an intimate, but not simple arrangement. Indeed, the trio seems to manifest all the parts of a more elaborate quintet performance among themselves. Israel’s playing in the middle choruses takes more and more prominence until it seems to spontaneously morph into a bass solo.

“Love is Here to Stay” is an unsentimental but jovial romp through the old Gershwin standard. Ella Fitzgerald may have done the definitive version of this tune in her Song Books, but she’d need to hold onto her hat to keep up with the trio here. The effective use of space in the arrangement of the chorus and the outro that shifts the song into a different key are both worth listening for.

“How My Heart Sings” is a brisk reprise of the title song from his earlier Riverside session. Here you can really hear the difference made by Bunker’s contribution to the trio’s sound, his brisk snare and hi-hat work urging Evans and Israels along. Israels is a particular delight on this track, with a lyrical bass melody under the chorus that sings. The whole track is over in less than three minutes.

“Who Can I Turn To” is a contemplative ballad, with Evans taking the first chorus out of time before a transition into a swinging second verse. The transition between verses hangs suspended in harmony each time, as Israels pauses on the fifth before dropping back down to underpin the chords. Evans shifts both time, moving rhythmically around the chords, and harmony in his solo.

“Come Rain or Come Shine” begins as a more melancholy iteration of the group dynamic from the prior track, but where “Who Can I Turn To” eventually finds a sunny mood, here the clouds stay stubbornly overhead. Minor key aside, Israels’ solo here is almost as brilliant as his subtle playing behind Evans; the pizzicato chords he plays ever so slightly out of time behind Evans in the intro to the last verse are stunning.

“If You Could See Me Now” becomes a showcase for the trio as they shift the rhythmic emphasis of the tune with each verse, keeping the chord progressions the same but playing swung eighth notes in one iteration, legato runs in another, marcato progressions in the third, and on for each evolution of the tune. Each verse seems to turn the kaleidoscope another fraction, revealing new highlights in the tune.

Trio ’65 would be the penultimate album for this incarnation of the Evans trio; they would play together just once more on Bill Evans Trio with Symphony Orchestra. The trio we’ll hear next time has some fresh faces at both bass and drums who would bring new energy to Evans’ approach.

You can listen to the full album here:

https://youtu.be/RBRF2cRVW1E

Bill Evans, Trio 64

Album of the Week, February 4, 2023

Bill Evans was having a good year (or two) in 1962 and 1963. Following the sessions that produced Moon Beams and How My Heart Sings!, his contract was picked up by Verve Records, where Creed Taylor was still in full swing. He recorded a handful of additional sessions for Riverside in , including material that appeared on Interplay and on the great posthumous release Loose Blues. He then started his Verve recording career in two sessions as a sideman, one backing West Coast drummer Shelley Manne and one with the Gary McFarland Orchestra. He recorded a set of solo piano sessions, with overdubs, that became the Grammy award winning Conversations with Myself. And he played on some clunkers of albums with orchestra, performing current movie themes (hey, nobody’s perfect).

But he was never too far from his trio. In mid-1963 he recorded live sessions with Chuck Israels and Paul Motian at Manne’s club, “Shelly’s Manne-Hole,” that were later released on Milestone as Time Remembered. And on December 18, 1963, he entered Verve’s studios in New York City with Motian and the 28-year-old bassist Gary Peacock to record what would become Trio 64.

I haven’t been able to find any information to explain why these sessions had Peacock on bass, rather than Israels. The latter continued to work with Evans for several more years, as we’ll see in next week’s recording. And while Peacock went on to have a long career, recording many albums with Motian and (most notably) anchoring another piano trio, the famous Keith Jarrett Standards Trio with Jack DeJohnette, he only did this one session with Evans. (A possible reason: he went on to join Miles Davis’ band, but briefly, in early 1964.) But because Peacock did record this session, we have a rare opportunity to compare and contrast the difference that his style makes in Evans’ trio. Answer: not much, and a lot.

One thing you’ll hear immediately in the performances is that Peacock’s bass has a woodier, more percussive sound, possibly due to Taylor’s production choices. But Peacock also performs, on this outing, much more like a traditional bassist, anchoring the bottom of the harmonies rather than the more vocal-style countermelodies that Israels provided. In this trio, Evans was fully in charge, and there’s less of the give and take that characterizes his performances with Israels.

The repertoire on the album is also slightly unusual. Unlike the last sessions for Riverside, which featured Evans’ own compositions alongside standards from the Song Book, this album is entirely comprised of standards, albeit a few that are a little less than standard. For instance, the opening track — the theme to the “Little Lulu” cartoon shorts from Paramount that aired between 1943 and 1948 — has rarely been heard in other jazz contexts. And the trio’s performance of J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie’s “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” reminds us that, as I’ve written before, most memorable 20th century Christmas songs are not only de facto part of the Great American Song Book, they’re often by Song Book songwriters.

Trio 64 is overall an engaging, even-keeled listen. While I don’t consider it essential in the way its predecessor albums are, it’s still fun—buoyant, even. Sadly, it was to be Paul Motian’s last performance with the trio. We’ll hear from a different incarnation of the group next time.

You can listen to the album here:

Ella Fitzgerald, Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas

Album of the Week, December 31, 2022

Every family has their holiday musical traditions. Many play the Vince Guaraldi A Charlie Brown Christmas album (we do, a lot). Some might play the Partridge Family Christmas album (we don’t, at all). But a tradition that Lisa and I discovered in the late 1990s, when it was reissued on CD, was Ella Fitzgerald’s first Christmas album.

I was thinking the other day about why jazz Christmas albums work so well. My conclusion: there’s a whole lot of Christmas songs that are really just Great American Songbook numbers, most of them from the same writers as those august luminaries. “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”? Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie, who also gave us “You Go to My Head.” “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”? Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane, of “The Trolley Song” (both from the musical Meet Me in St. Louis). “What Are You Doing New Years’ Eve?” is a Frank Loesser song, who also wrote “Slow Boat to China,” “Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year,” and the songs for the Hans Christian Anderson musical, among many others. And that’s just picking three tracks from the first side of this album…

The 1960 recording session for Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas came at a propitious time in Ella’s career. As we noted in reviewing Ella and Duke at the Côte D’Azur, she was in the middle of recording her Song Book series, each release of which celebrated a particular composer of the Great American Songbook. In 1960, she had just released the George and Ira Gershwin volume the year before, which followed the Irving Berlin volume from 1958, the Duke Ellington volume in 1957, and both the Rodgers and Hart and Cole Porter volumes in 1956. Accordingly, the selection here features six numbers from Song Book composers (side 1 ends with “The Christmas Song,” by Bob Wells with Mel Tormé; on side 2, there’s also Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne’s “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” and Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas”). But there are also numbers from other sources, including Leroy Anderson’s great “Sleigh Ride,” Johnny Marks’ “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” (surely the most durable 20th century song based on a Montgomery Wards advertising mascot!), “Frosty the Snowman,” Felix Bernard and Richard B. Smith’s “Winter Wonderland,” and even Count Basie’s “Good Morning Blues,” which here receives its definitive 20th century performance. (The 21st century crown for this number might go to Cécile McLorin Salvant with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra.)

And then there’s “Jingle Bells.” It may be the oldest tune on the album, but Ella and arranger/conductor Frank DeVol give J. S. Pierpont’s most famous contribution a mighty workout. This is the one tune on the recording where Ella really lets fly with the jazz swing vocals she is most famous for, culminating with the absolutely bonkers declaration at the end, “I’m just crazy ‘bout horses!” Us too, Ella.

The arrangements throughout veer between relaxed and exuberant, swinging hard throughout, a characteristic shared by Ella’s songbook recordings. In fact, it’s not too much of a stretch to dub this a “missing” songbook recording, as it fits right in. It’s an absolute joy and one worth adding to your record collection.

Listen…

Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington, Ella & Duke at the Côte d’Azur

Album of the Week, November 26, 2022

Duke Ellington, in 1967, was in the prime of his post-peak creative years. Having spent some time between labels building his reputation as an elder statesman, as we saw last week with Duke Ellington & John Coltrane, he was shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize in Music in 1965 (though ironically no award was given that year; he is said to have joked “Fate doesn’t want me to be famous too young”). He was still recording major works, including the Far East Suite in 1966. And he was touring and performing with dozens of other musicians. I’ve reviewed a record from that period, when he performed with the Boston Pops; see my write up of The Duke at Tanglewood, which I found ultimately dissatisfying due to the lack of simpatico between Ellington and his competent, yet square, stage-mates.

No such problem exists between the performers in today’s recording. Ella & Duke at the Côte d’Azur feels as though it ought to have been a bootleg due to the electricity of the crowd energy that’s captured and that clearly infects the performers. It is, in a word, jumpin’.

Ella and Duke had recorded several times together by the time this recording was made in 1966, starting in 1957 when she collaborated with Ellington on Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Song Book. Part of her great Song Book series in which she elevated the work of American songwriters from Tin Pan Alley to canon, this was the only record in which she performed with the songwriter himself. She had also recorded Ella at Duke’s Place in the studio in 1965, and The Stockholm Concert, 1966 was cut earlier the same summer that the two met at the International Festival of Jazz for a series of concerts. The double LP here is apparently only a taste of the combined performances; together they recorded some 80-plus tracks, which eventually saw release in an 8 CD Verve set in 1998 as the Côte d’Azur Concerts.

What’s striking is how much fun Ella, in particular, seems to be having. She gets a full two choruses into “Mack the Knife” before she starts scatting and improvising over the band. According to the liner notes, there was no arrangement for the tune—they just started playing, and it’s audible in the music as it goes through multiple key changes. At one point, Ella sings “We’re making a record of the same old song… we swung old Mackie down for you people here at the Jazz Festival! We’re going to sing, we’re going to swing, we’re going to add one more chorus!” And she adds another two choruses, then a third, going up a half step in between each one. You can hear the socks of the crowd being blown off.

While Ella and Duke play together on the first track, many of the remaining numbers are played only by one group or the other, starting with Ellington’s usual group—Paul Gonsalves, Cat Anderson, Harry Carney, Ray Nance, Johnny Hodges, Mercer Ellington, Buster Cooper, Sam Woodyard, etc.— on “The Old Circus Train Turn-Around Blues.” The liner notes call out the tune’s similarity to “Night Train,” but it’s a fun enough romp nonetheless.

Ella’s group takes the stage next. She’s backed by the Jimmy Jones piano trio featuring Jim Hughart on bass and the mighty Grady Tate on drums. Her “Lullaby of Birdland” is not very lullaby-like, but it’s delightful nonetheless. This is followed by Ellington’s group, with Ellington announcing, “Buster Cooper will be the virtuosoist in ‘Trombonio-Bustiosso-Issimo.’” Cooper is hot indeed in the solo, with the band lighting a fire underneath him.

Ella’s group switches things up a bit with “Goin’ Out of My Head,” the newest composition on the record and a reminder of her late-sixties pop work on albums like her 1969 Ella. But if the tune sounds a little dated to modern ears, she gives it her all here. Ella never really belts on her records, but she certainly comes close on this one. Grady Tate provides a slightly samba-inflected beat behind the tune, swinging back into a rock beat in the chorus and keeping things lively throughout. She continues with “How Long Has This Been Going On?,” singing the Gershwin standard with nuance and subtlety and taking us into a different world for an all too brief moment.

Ellington’s band returns for a medley of “Diminuendo in Blue/Blow by Blow,” with Ellington growling and shouting encouragement to his players above the fray. Paul Gonsalves reprises an abbreviated version of his infinite solo from the famed Newport 1956 concerts. Next the band begins a performance of “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing” that has the crowd applauding from the first chords of the tune, and Ella joins them in, breaking up as Ellington shouts inaudible encouragement from the piano. After a few verses and some spectacular scatting from Ella, another from Ellington’s band steps up and trades scat bars with her. But Ella cannot be imitated or brushed off, and she carries the rest of the song, dropping in a reference to “A Hard Day’s Night” before driving the song to closure. The Ellington band concludes this set with “All Too Soon,” providing Ray Nance an opportunity to show off his violin playing together with Ben Webster and Buster Cooper. There’s no showboating here, just solid solos from all three protagonists.

Ella’s band returns with settings of “Misty” and “So Danço Samba,” called “Jazz Samba” on the original label but corrected on my copy. “Misty” is played straight and sensitively, with a closing straight out of the Sarah Vaughan playbook, but “So Danço Samba” is something else again. Combining a sensitive approach to the Brazilian original with interspersed scatting, a touch of “The Girl from Ipanema,” and ending with a whispered beat-box of a vocal solo that has her trading percussive licks with Grady Tate before she takes a resurgent and triumphant sung conclusion, she cracks up the band and takes the crowd by storm.

The Ellington band returns with a request, a “totally unprepared, unrehearsed, no arrangement” version of “Rose of the Rio Grande.” Buster Cooper takes the solo on his trombone, duetting with Sam Woodyard’s bass in a brief interlude and closing the whole work out in a roaring crescendo. Ella’s band then takes over with an achingly tender “The More I See You” before yielding again to Ellington for “The Matador (El Viti).” Ella rejoins Duke for a final performance of “Just Squeeze Me (But Please Don’t Tease Me),” where she trades scat syllables and bluesy growls with the great pianist and trades verses with Ben Webster, and finally addresses the audience, “You’ve made us sentimental, the way you received our show/We’d love to squeeze you, really don’t want to tease you.” The audience returns the expressed affection with a roar of applause, bringing the set to an end.

This brings our series on Duke Ellington to a fitting close, as I’ve run out of vinyl with his compositions. We’ve heard many different sides of the man: the innovative composer, the bandleader who played the orchestra like a piano, the sensitive, intuitive collaborator, and finally the master showman. There’s a lot more Ellington to explore, but the calendar is turning. Next week we’ll be exploring something very different.

You can listen to the album here: