Sunday morning coming down | Power Line

Listening to Ella Fitzgerald’s recordings of “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most” to celebrate the season reminded me that I haven’t written about her for a long time. They also whetted my appetite to return to her music.

Each period of her long career is rewarding, though she deepened her art as she got older. She excelled in a wide variety of material and in every musical setting. There is an emotional reserve or detachment in her singing, but there is also joy and an irrepressible sense of fun in her approach. She has an incredibly deep catalog of great music. In my eyes she was one of the twentieth century’s great artists, deep in the American grain.

The songs that served as vehicles for Ella’s virtuosity invariably displayed her sense of fun. Listen, for example, to “You’ll Have to Swing It (Mr. Paganini).” This is her 1961 Verve recording of the song.

Or “Air Mail Special” (1957), before a jazz audience live at Newport. She wants to catch you by surprise. This one might make you laugh out loud.

Or “How High the Moon” (1960).

The fun is vividly on display in her startling impersonation of Louis Armstrong on “Basin Street Blues” (1949).

She could also bring out the beauty in a ballad, as she did, for example, in “You Go To My Head” with Joe Pass (1974). Ann Hampton Callaway calls this Fitzgerald’s “unspoken side.”

Speaking of ballads, I recall that the first Fitzgerald album I bought was her 1950 recording of Gershwin songs with Ellis Larkins accompanying her on piano. I traipsed up to D.J. Leary’s record store in St. Anthony to track that album down. “I know how Columbus felt…”

Fitzgerald became a professional singer at an early age, but the route was surprisingly indirect. She originally turned up at amateur night at the Apollo Theater on a bet at age 17 to perform as a dancer. She reassessed her prospects when she took a look at the competition and decided to sing instead. She performed “Judy” and “The Object of My Affection” in the style of her idol, Connee Boswell of the Boswell Sisters. Biographer Stuart Nicholson reports: “To Ella’s delight and surprise, she brought down the house.”

Fitzgerald won the talent show, moving on to her distinguished career. In a personal life marred by misfortune — she became an orphan as a teenager, ended up in reform school, and lived without a home the year before she appeared at the Apollo — her winning the talent contest as a singer was not her only good luck. Her work with Dizzie Gillespie’s band in the 1940s added adventures in bebop to her repertoire. But I credit her long association with producer/manager Norman Granz as the best thing that ever happened to her.

Granz loved good music and hated racial prejudice, in roughly equal measure. He put his money where his mouth was too, generally refusing to book his artists in racially segregated venues or otherwise accommodate Jim Crow. This extremely interesting figure has finally received the full-scale biographical treatment that he deserves in his own right (and we also have Nat Hentoff’s illuminating BBC radio series on him). Fitzgerald must have trusted Granz deeply. Her relationship with him was a permanent fixture in her life, perhaps the only one.

Granz first brought Fitzgerald aboard his Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts in the 1940s, becoming her manager in 1953. Granz was responsible for her career from the mid-’50s on, the period during which she became a world-renowned artist. He produced the “songbook” series of albums on Verve that brought Fitzgerald the respectful attention of a wide audience.

When I was a graduate student in English Literature, I learned that I needed to attend to Ella when I saw the prominent literary critic William Wimsatt ask for Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook at the old Cutler’s Record Shop in New Haven. Below is Ella’s recording of “Miss Otis Regrets” from the Porter Songbook.

Granz also produced Fitzgerald’s concerts around the world. She reveled in the adulation of enthusiastic European audiences and did some of her best work before them. Take a listen, for example, to Ella in Rome (1958), Mack the Knife: The Complete Ella Live in Berlin (1960), or Ella in Hamburg (1965).

Ella blanked on the lyrics to “Mack the Knife” before her appreciative Berlin audience. You can hear her genius and her sense of fun fill in the blanks in this famous recording. “Louis Armstrong” makes an impromptu appearance.

In the video below, Granz introduces the finale of his 1958 JATP show including Ella at Amsterdam’s beautiful Concertgebouw. The lineup features the Oscar Peterson trio with Ray Brown on bass and Herb Ellis on guitar. Violinist Stuff Smith, Peterson, Ellis, and trumpet player Roy Eldridge take the solos on Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).” There was no musical setting in which Ella didn’t shine, but this historic footage places Ella in a great one. Recorded off Dutch television, the video is cut off abruptly toward the end of the performance.

Granz founded Verve in part to record Fitzgerald when her contract with Decca expired, and then founded Pablo Records to resume recording her after he sold Verve. Scott Yanow’s Allmusic profile observes:

Fitzgerald’s later years were saved by Norman Granz’s decision to form…Pablo [in 1973]. Starting with a Santa Monica Civic concert in 1972 that is climaxed by Fitzgerald’s incredible version of “C Jam Blues” (in which she trades off with and “battles” five classic jazzmen), Fitzgerald was showcased in jazz settings throughout the 1970s with the likes of Count Basie, Oscar Peterson, and Joe Pass, among others.

The video below is the recording of “C Jam Blues” to which Yanow refers. You used to have to pay something like $50 for the three-CD set to find this on track 14 of the third disc.

Granz managed both Ella and Oscar Peterson. When Ira Gershwin called Granz to complain that the instrumental version of Gershwin songs recorded by Oscar Peterson failed to recognize the lyricist in the liner notes, the two became friends. Ella and Armstrong recorded Porgy and Bess together in the summer of 1957, one of their three joint projects. Granz would drive over to Ira Gershwin’s Beverly Hills home and the two would sit up late listening to acetates from the Porgy and Bess sessions.

Hershorn relates that the Armstrong/Fitzgerald recording of “Summertime” made Gershwin weep. He quotes Granz: “Ira was overwhelmed by the poignancy of Louis’s voice and said he wished George were alive to hear the records.”

Well, I know the feeling. The Armstrong/Fitzgerald recording of “Bess You Is My Woman Now” from the same session also hits home with me. I wonder what Ira said about this one. It made me weep!

In the video below, Ella sings W.C. Handy’s classic “St. Louis Blues” backed by Count Basie and his big band at Montreux in 1979. In this performance you can hear America singing: “I hate to see that evenin’ sun go down.” Ella is past her prime, as is the Basie band, but (Sarah Vaughan and Mel Tormé excepted) she’s still about a million miles beyond whoever was second best that year.

As Ella leaves the stage, the band vamps on “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” the song Ella had worked up into her first hit when she recorded it with the Chick Webb Orchestra in 1938. It’s an exit that brings her magnificent career full circle.