Ella Fitzgerald - Ella And Louis

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Ella And Louis

Ella Fitzgerald

Ella Fitzgerald - Ella And Louis
33FEllaFitzgerald1

Verve...MGV-4003...1956...High Fidelity

Side 1
1) Can´t We Be Friends
2) Isn´t This A Lovely Day
3) Moonlight In Vermont
4) They Can´t Take That Away From Me
5) Under A Blanket Of Blue
6) Tenderly

Side 2
1) A Foggy Day
2) Stars Fell On Alabama
3) Cheek To Cheek
4) The Nearness Of You
5) April In Paris

Ella Fitzgerald - Ella And Louis

ON THE BACK OF THE JACKET

ELLA and LOUIS

JAZZ, unlike a bucket of nails, is full of paradoxes. There is, for example, the iconoclasm of the soloist having to mesh with collective improvisation. There is also, for lack of a better term, the business of jazz singing. Jazz, of course, began a good century ago as a vocal music. Yet, it has become increasingly clear with the diminishing of the great blues shouters and the general shitting of the center of the music to an instrumental bias that vocal jazz is, with few exceptions, an extraordinarily difficult form that offers one possible advantage: it´:s easier to carry a voice around than a bass fiddle. In fact, the one definable tradition of jazz singing is probably blues singing. The rest of jazz singing has for some time been in the scattered, dissimilar hands of people who have persisted without the backrest of tradition. Among male singers who have not, by and large, had the prowess of female jazz singers-there have been Leo Watson, the remarkable scat singer whose word streams formed a series of harsh, cubistic dreams of birds, Chicago, and big bass drums; Jelly Roll Morton, a great jazz singer whose soft, thin, barreling voice still restains on his records an urgent poignancy, and his semi-followers, Clancy Hayes and Turk Murphy; Lips Page; Jack Teagarden, his prvoice good burlap; Nat King Cole, who developed a Casual, suede approach; and, finally, Louis Armstrong. Among the women, there have been, outside of the early blues singers, two, or possibly three principal figures-Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Mildred Bailey and alongside them, as well as stemming from them, such as Anita O´Day and Sarah Vaughan.

In recent years, the ranks of female jazz singers, though swelling daily, have been peopled by little more than handsome, leggy dilutions. But Ella Fitzgerald, has, for one reason and another, remained the most vigorous and ineffable singer in jazz and popular music. Her style was virtually set by the time she began professionally in the Thirties with Chick Webb. It was a rhythmical, agile, humorous way of singing that depended on a healthy, rather ordinary voice; a lack of useless ornamentation (most young singers today affect styles that are, basically, borrowed ornamentations); a direct and understanding delivery of lyrics (again, most young singers handle lyrics as if they were sucking mothballs) ; and a musicianship that enabled her to get away from the melody in a way that any composer would have been proud had he thought of it originally. It has, nevertheless, become more subtle, more flexible, more polished, and recently has manifested a luminous lyricism that is not apparent so much in its single parts as in the whole. She gives the impression today of the finished artist whose seams no longer show, whose approach is stable but exciting, and whose mind is in balance with the heart.

LOUIS ARMSTRONG, on the other hand, has retained the insuperable singing style he had worked out by the late Thirties. There is less of the whooping, shoveling quality in his voice, which has, like rough waters, inevitably smoothed down, but the great singing foundation is apparent, particularly in the way he approaches ballads. And what great warmth and soul! What his voice has always been is an indication of how jazz singing could go. Louis invariably handles melody like a bear giving a hug; he smothers it in the peculiarities of his voice and enunciation, and out pops a new shapea kind of counter-melody, dressed, nevertheless, in tweeds and pearls.

Unfortunately, of late, Louis has confined himself almost exclusively to remaking blues of an earlier age and pedestrian popular songs so that each impression was but a fainter and dimmer carbon of the original great talent. This record gives Louis a chance at restoration. The materials are a judicious choice of high-level standards. And instead of his usual, diffident Dixieland backing, there are the Oscar Peterson Trio (Ray Brown on bass and Herb Ellis on guitar) plus Buddy Rich, who are properly pulsive and wholly discreet. In such a palmy setting, Armstrong is in simple, unraffish condition, and Ella is in impeccable voice. The record is full of pleasant inventions: Louis, muted, behind Ella; Ella humming behind Louis´ open horn; Ella and Louis in duet and a kind of near-counterpoint; Louis singing the verse of a song with such great feeling; Ella mimicing Louis; and always, the contrast of the rough and the fairway-of two remarkable voices and talents. A quiet, Sunday-go-to-meeting record, with slow and middle tempos throughout, (that, however, never stop swinging), it creates the sort of jazz that is pensive, rich, and rewarding.

The Songs are:

CAN´T WE BE FRIENDS	TENDERLY
(Swift-James) Harms, Inc. ASCAP	(Gross-Lawrence) Edwin M. Morris & Co., Inc. ASCAP
ISN´T THIS A LOVELY DAY	A FOGGY DAY
(Berlin) Irving Berlin Music Corp. ASCAP	(George and Ira Gershwin) Chappell & Co., Inc. ASCAP
MOONLIGHT IN VERMONT	STARS FELL ON ALABAMA
(Suessdorf-Blackbum) Michael H. Goldsen, Inc. ASCAP	(Parish-Perkins) Mills Music, Inc. ASCAP
THEY CAN'T TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME	CHEEK TO CHEEK
(George and Ira Gershwin) Gershwin Pub. Corp. ASCAP	(Berlin) Irving Berlin Music Corp. ASCAP
UNDER A BLANKET OF BLUE	THE NEARNESS OF YOU
(Neiburg-Symes-Livingston) Joy Music, Inc. ASCAP	(Carmichael-Washington) Famous Music Corp. ASCAP

APRIL IN PARIS
(Harburg-Duke) Harms, Inc. ASCAP

Cover Photo by Phil Stern
Album Produced by Norman Granz

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