Greatness Meets Greatness

 Top artists in their respective fields.  Ella Fitzgerald and Willie Mays.

 

Summertime

Noticed my posting from several years ago has an inoperative link.  This is Ella Fitzgerald performing Summertime at a 1968 concert in Berlin.  Magnificent.

It Ain't Necessarily So

Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong have fun deconstructing this Gershwin tune from Porgy & Bess.

Lush Life

A song that could only have been written in that brief interval between 1945 and the end of mid-century America in November 1963.  The opening:

I used to visit all the very gay places
Those come-what-may places
Where one relaxes on the axis
Of the wheel of life
To get the feel of life
From jazz and cocktails

And those ending lines:

I'll live a lush life

In some small dive

And there I'll be
While I rot with the rest
Of those whose lives are lonely, too

Composed by Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington's frequent collaborator.

Vocal by Ella Fitzgerald, who effortlessly handles the difficult melody.  Oscar Peterson on piano.

It's Alright With Me

It's the wrong time

And the wrong place

Though your face is charming 

It's the wrong face

Composed by Cole Porter for the 1950s musical Can Can and performed by the magnificent Ella Fitzgerald.

Ella & Frank

Frank Sinatra is the finest male singer of the Great American Songbook.  Ella Fitzgerald is the finest singer.  Sinatra, a man not short of confidence, once said that Ella was the only performer he was nervous about appearing with because she was the best.  This video shows why.  This is Sinatra and Fitzgerald performing The Lady is a Tramp.  Sinatra is fine.  Ella is great.  Sinatra's vocal peak was in the 1950s and by the time of this appearance his voice had lost some of its elasticity, but even peak Sinatra could not match Ella most of the time, though on ballads and saloon songs like Angel Eyes, Wee Small Hours Of The Morning, Only The Lonely, and One For My Baby And One More For The Road he is absolutely sublime, and there is no one better.

The video is from a Sinatra TV special in 1967, A Man and his Music.  It was the third, and last, episode in an annual series that started in 1965, that featured Frank and his selected guests.  Enjoy.

All That Sphinx Jazz

 Louis Armstrong (a frequent THC subject) and his wife, Lucille, in Egypt (1961).

While we're here might as well listen to some Louis (with Duke Ellington).  Couldn't resist adding this version of the same tune, this time from Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald (is there a better singer than Ella?).

UPDATE:  Armstrong's Egyptian visit was part of an African tour arranged by the State Department and he made many other tours during the 50s and 60s sponsored by the US government.   In September 1957, Armstrong leveraged his reputation and State's desire to use him as a representative of America, to threaten not to do further tours unless action was taken to integrate schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, a tale I wrote about here and here.

Summertime

According to Wikipedia there are more than 33,000 covers of Summertime.  Any version by Ella Fitzgerald is the finest.  This one, from German TV in 1968, is my favorite.  Though the sound quality of the minimal instrumentation is poor, her voice is magical and haunting, almost as though she is reciting a prayer.  Her ability to control tone throughout her register is remarkable.


The music for the song was composed by George Gershwin (who also co-wrote, with brother Ira, several of the songs introduced by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers).  The lyrics are by Dubose Heyward.  Heyward, born in 1885 in Charleston SC, descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence and of the state's planter elite, became interested in the low country black community and wrote the novel and play Porgy in the 1920s.  He then teamed with Gershwin to create the opera Porgy and Bess which premiered in 1935.

Below is another of the 33,000, a casual soundcheck before a 1990 concert in Osaka, Japan by Prince and his band.

Ella

Today's the 100th birthday of the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald.  Ella was so good she could even intimidate Frank Sinatra, who thought her the premiere vocalist of the time and would not record with her because he felt he could not measure up.  The purity of her voice and tonal control across her broad vocal range remains remarkable.

Two songs for today.  The first is Bill Strayhorn's Lush Life with its difficult melody.  On this version the great Oscar Peterson is on piano.  The second is the upbeat They All Laughed.

Miss Otis Regrets

Miss Otis regrets
She's unable to lunch today

A very odd little song.  Composed by Cole Porter in 1934; this version, by Ella Fitzgerald, is from the 1950s.

Dream A Little Dream Of Me

Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald duet on Dream A Little Dream Of Me, written in 1931 by Fabrian Andre, Wilbur Schwandt and Gus Kahn and first recorded that same year by Ozzie Nelson (yes, that Ozzie).  THC first became familiar with the song when Mama Cass Eliot of The Mamas and Papas released a version in 1968.

The Lady Is A Tramp

Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald team up during a Sinatra TV special in the 1960s.  Frank is great as always but Ella takes it to another level.  The Lady Is A Tramp was composed by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart for the 1937 musical, Babes In Arms.

They All Laughed

They all laughed at Christopher Columbus
When he said the world was round
They all laughed when Edison recorded sound

Music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin.  Composed for the 1937 film Shall We Dance starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.  This version sung by the mellifluous Ella Fitzgerald.

Angel Eyes

It's a quarter to three . . . 

(From NY Daily News)

As we enter the second Sinatra century here's a song THC has featured before - his Sinatra favorite, Angel Eyes.

Composed by Earl Brent and Matt Dennis.  Mark Steyn (who is a marvelous music writer, particularly on the Great American Songbook, even if you don't like his politics) describes why its structure is so unusual:

For a pop song, the tune is consciously bluesy in the way of "Harlem Nocturne" or "You Don't Know What Love Is", but the words go beyond, and the vocabulary and phrasing are very unusual:

Try to think
That love's not around
Still it's uncomf'tably near
My old heart
Ain't gainin' no ground
Because my Angel Eyes ain't here...

Dennis' music is memorable because of the arresting flat nine in Bar Three, and big leaps when the tune's going up, followed by small slips back down. It's a tune that's made for saloons - those up-leaps of anger and passion, and the slip-downs into dejection and despair. But that third bar could easily trip up a lyricist or at least put a speed-bump in his text. Instead, Earl Brent gets around it with a four-syllable word that, on those notes, is rendered onomatopoeic: When the singer sings "uncomf'tably near", you hear his discomfort. Even more remarkably, Dennis and Brent match it when the moment recurs in the next eight bars and again at the end:

Angel Eyes
That ol' devil sent
They glow unbearably bright...

And again in that word on that interval - "unbearably" - the singer sounds as if he truly can't bear it, not much longer. In theory, the melody sounds as if it ought to be an instrumental - one of those things like "Sophisticated Lady" or "Prelude To A Kiss" that sounds less like a song than a tune that someone's stuck words on - but Brent not only finds words that fit perfectly, but four-syllable ones at that:

Pardon me
But I gotta run
The fact's uncommonly clear...

The tune is so bluesy that, in the musicologist Ted Gioia's words, it "invites a soloist to pull out every stale minor blues cliche". Which happens rather a lot on instrumental versions. But the lyric makes it dark and strange and raw: a great ache of a melody with an oddly self-aware tale to tell. Dennis wrote his composition in D minor, which suits it perfectly, but the middle section is major in character and almost an inversion of the main theme: now the music leaps down and then climbs small steps back up. Lyric-wise, if the main section is like eavesdropping on someone's private pain, the release is an invitation to gather round and listen to him tell his story:

So drink up, all you people
Order anything you see...

According to Steyn, it's due to Ella Fitzgerald that the song gained its cache.  After catching Matt Dennis play it in a Reno nightclub, she decided to record the song (and recording four different versions over the years).  It was only years later, in 1957, that Sinatra recorded it.

It's instructive to listen to both Ella and Frank's versions to see the difference.  Ella's is lovely, but Frank is simply the guy - as a singer he acts the role - and it's bundled up with the gorgeous arrangement by Nelson Riddle (catch the bit with the harp at the very end).  Sinatra also takes the middle section and starts the song with it (he repeats in later as it was written) making for a much better and dramatic opening.

When Sinatra did his first retirement show in 1971 he used Angel Eyes to close, slowly disappearing into the darkness as he sang the last line: "scuse me, while I disappear".




And you can watch his dramatic live performance of Angel Eyes here.

Hey drink up all you people
Order anything you see
And have fun you happy people
The laugh and the drinks on me

Try to think that loves not around
Still it's uncomfortably near
My poor old heart aint gaining any ground
Because my angel eyes aint here

Angel eyes, that old devil sent
They glow unbearably bright
Need I say that my loves mispent
Mispent with angel eyes tonight

So drink up all of you people
Order anything you see
And have fun you happy people
The drink and the laughs on me

Pardon me but I got to run
The facts uncommonly clear
I got to find who's now the number one
And why my angel eyes aint here

Scuse me while I disappear 

Baby, It's Cold Outside

Vocals by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan.  Ella gets my vote for best vocalist of the 20th century.  Incredible tone control no matter where she is in the register and she makes it seem so smooth and effortless.  THC has featured her once before doing a stunning version of Summertime on German TV in 1968 and it's an incredible performance even with the crummy YouTube sound. UPDATE:  The version of Summertime linked to in the prior post does not work.  You can find an active version here.

Louis Jordan is not well-known today but was a very popular singer and bandleader in the 1940s and early 1950s and was one of the first black artists to have crossover hits with a white audience.  From 1942 through 1950 he had 36 Top 3 singles on the Billboard R&B charts along with 12 Top 10 on the Billboard US and Country charts, including three number 1s.  He's credited as one of the key originators of the R&B style that evolved into Rock n Roll in the early 1950s and was cited as an inspiration by Chuck Berry, Little Richard and James Brown.

Baby, It's Cold Outside was written by Frank Loesser, who also wrote the lyrics and music for Guys and Dolls and How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying.  He wrote it in 1944 for a house party and performed it as a duet with his wife.  It made its first commercial appearance in the 1949 film, Neptune's Daughter, where it was performed twice, once by Ricardo Montalban and Esther Williams and then by Red Skelton(!) and Betsy Garrett.  Loesser won the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

The song was immediately recorded by many artists with seven versions being released just in 1949 and it is still often covered today (including by Zooey Deschanel and Will Ferrell in Elf).  The Ella/Louis version was part of that first wave in 1949.  

Summertime

Ella Fitzgerald in Berlin (1968).  Sound quality is not ideal but this is her best version of a song she recorded dozens of times and sang thousands of times (and you can find most of them on YouTube!).  Spare instrumentation, incredible voice control, tone and emotion.