Sunday morning coming down

Yesterday we celebrated the anniversary of the birth of Ella Fitzgerald, the First Lady of Song. As a diversion during the great hunkering down, I seek to press the case that her birthday should be a national holiday, and I don’t mean on the nearest Monday. I mean on April 25.

The lady was an inspirational artist. 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. In my eyes she was one of the twentieth century’s great artists, deep in the American grain. I can’t even skim the surface of her career in this post. I can only apologize for the omissions and oversights. I hope only to provide readers who enjoy the music a fraction of the pleasure I had working on this while perhaps introducing you to a few recordings with which you may be unfamiliar.

Ella entered on Decca Records fronting the Chick Webb Orchestra. “A-Tisket A-Tasket” was her first hit with the boys in 1938, during the Great Depression (above). She lifted spirits then and now. When I became an Ella fanatic, I bought the four-CD set of The Legendary Decca Recordings. It is an excellent selection of her best work on the label. I was shocked by its high quality. Many of these recordings are buried treasures.

The songs that served as vehicles for Ella’s virtuosity invariably displayed her sense of fun. Listen, for example, to “How High the Moon,” “Air Mail Special,” “Flying Home,” or “You’ll Have to Swing It (Mr. Paganini)” (above). The fun is also vividly on display in her startling impersonation of Louis Armstrong on “Basin Street Blues.”

Ella 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. She worked with many stellar musicians. But her long association with producer/manager Norman Granz must be singled out as her greatest stroke of good fortune.

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 (Norman Granz: The Man Who Used Jazz for Justice, by Tad Hershorn). Fitzgerald must have trusted Granz deeply. Her relationship with him was a permanent fixture in her life, perhaps the only one and, according to Hershorn, Granz’s management was based on a handshake agreement with her.

Granz first brought Fitzgerald aboard his epochal Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts in the 1940’s, becoming her manager in 1953. Granz was responsible for her career from the mid-’50’s 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.

Granz produced three albums on Verve that paired Ella with Louis Armstrong over a few days in 1956 and 1957. They glow with a beauty-and-the-beast chemistry. When Ira Gershwin called Granz to complain that the instrumental version of Gershwin songs recorded by Oscar Peterson (also one of Granz’s artists) failed to recognize the lyricist in the liner notes, the two became friends. As Ella and Armstrong recorded Porgy and Bess together in the summer of 1957, “Granz would drive over to Ira Gershwin’s Beverly Hills home and the two would sit up late listening to acetates from the session.”

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.” With that kind of a recommendation, it should find a place here as an example of Ella’s work as a solo artist on the Gershwin catalog and together with Armstrong on the Porgy and Bess double album, the third of their three albums together.

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 (below). It made me weep!

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).

In the video above Granz introduced the finale of his 1958 Jazz at the Philharmonic show including Ella at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw. The lineup featured 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.

Ella could sing the blues to telling effect as well, as in her recording of W.C. Handy’s classic “St. Louis Blues” (above). You can hear America singing: “I hate to see that evenin’ sun go down.”

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.” Thanks to YouTube, the recording is now widely available (above). You can hear what Yenor was talking about.

I deduced that I needed to attend to Ella when I saw the prominent literary critic William Wimsatt ask for Ella’s Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook at the old Cutler’s Record Shop in New Haven in 1974. Above is Ella’s recording of “Miss Otis Regrets” from the Porter Songbook. Thank you, Professor Wimsatt.

I fell in love with Ella’s work in her later years, when she was perhaps past the peak of her powers. I ate up her work with the incredible players Granz surrounded her with on Fine and Mellow. “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” was the closing number (above).

Granz also paired her with Oscar Peterson and with Joe Pass to great effect. As always, she brought out the beauty in the ballads. Ann Hampton Callaway calls this Fitzgerald’s “unspoken side.” Above is her version of “You Go To My Head,” accompanied only by Pass. It represents a memorable case of expressive form, as Professor Wimsatt himself might have put it.