Sings The Cole Porter Songbook

Ella Fitzgerald

Verve Records, 1956

http://www.ellafitzgerald.com

REVIEW BY: Jason Warburg

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 02/21/2022

What Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue was instrumental jazz, Ella Fitzgerald Sings The Cole Porter Songbook was for vocal jazz: a landmark album by an artist whose enduring influence continues to echo through the halls of popular music more than half a century later.

Ella Jane Fitzgerald’s reign as the so-called “First Lady of Song” (or “Queen of Jazz”) had modest beginnings. Growing up in New York City, a tumultuous home life had her living and singing on the streets of Harlem before her first big break: in November 1934, at the age of 17, she won one of the earliest Amateur Night competitions at the Apollo Theater. A few months later she was hired on to sing for swing bandleader Chick Webb’s orchestra, regarded as the “house band” of Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom. In 1938 they scored her first hit together with “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” a swing jazz reinterpretation of a nursery rhyme that became one of the biggest-selling records of the decade. The following year Webb died and Fitzgerald assumed leadership of the band, recast as Ella And Her Famous Orchestra.

During the war years, bebop rapidly overtook big-band swing as the most popular form of jazz and Ella adapted to the times, learning to scat while working with Dizzy Gillespie; by the time her career was over she would be acknowledged as one of the greatest scat singers in history. During this same period producer Norman Granz became her manager after she began singing for Jazz at the Philharmonic, a concert series he had founded. In 1955 Fitzgerald left Decca Records and Granz formed Verve Records as a showcase for his star client.

Ella’s first recording for Verve, produced by Granz, would be Ella Fitzgerald Sings The Cole Porter Songbook. The album was so successful that it inspired a series; over the next eight years, Fitzgerald would go on to record seven more albums in the same vein, covering the songbooks of Rodgers & Hart, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Johnny Mercer and others, singing her way through the heart of the Great American Songbookmy_heart_sings_the_harmony_web_ad_alt_250 .

The first thing any fresh listener to Ella Fitzgerald is struck by is her absolute purity of tone; it’s a voice for the ages, an instrument of tremendous precision and power, wielded masterfully and often with apparent joy. Her diction and phrasing is equally remarkable, crystal clear and meticulous while also warm and playful; a single couplet in an Ella Fitzgerald performance can feel like an entire conversation. Her career would see her collaborate with Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Joe Pass, Duke Ellington, and The Ink Spots, among others, and one of her greatest admirers was Frank Sinatra.

For this album, Fitzgerald and Granz gleefully pillaged the vast Cole Porter songbook, putting Ella’s unique touch on everything from well-known jazz standards to obscure rarities, movie soundtracks to Broadway showtunes. Hearing Ella tackle a timeless hit like “Anything Goes” or “It’s De-Lovely” would be a pure pleasure regardless, but the bonus here is that, in keeping with the common practice and recording technology of the era, the entire album was recorded live in the studio in arrangements ranging from small combos to full orchestras, so that the interplay you hear between piano, bass, drums, horns, strings, guitars and Ella is all captured in real time, feeling as organic and immediate as the day it was recorded.

In addition to their entertainment value, it’s fascinating to hear Ella’s takes on tunes like “I Get A Kick Out Of You” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” also famously covered by Sinatra. It’s clear that he was more than a casual fan; Ella’s performances make his feel like virtual homage, as if he was simply trying to live up to Ella’s definitive takes.

Somehow the familiarity of Porter’s songbook, sprinkled with stage and screen hits like “Night And Day” and “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall In Love,” makes Ella’s takes on them feel all the more remarkable. In every case she makes the song her own, inhabiting them emotionally as if she had been their author. As great a performer as Fitzgerald was, her most extraordinary skills were as an interpreter, a gift well exploited by the Songbook series, which positioned her as the voice of an era. Another performer might have wilted under that kind of pressure; Ella just sang her considerable heart out and won accolade after accolade.

It would be difficult to overestimate the cultural impact and significance of Ella Fitzgerald’s Songbook series, which began with this 1956 album. As Frank Rich of the New York Times put it, she “performed a cultural transaction as extraordinary as Elvis' contemporaneous integration of white and African American soul. Here was a black woman popularizing urban songs often written by immigrant Jews to a national audience of predominantly white Christians.” The importance of this and Fitzgerald’s subsequent Songbook albums is underscored by the fact that 66 years later, the acknowledgment and celebration of Black achievements continues to be met with resistance from racist elements in American society.

Sings The Cole Porter Songbook was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2000, registering it formally as a recording of “qualitative or historical significance.” Three years later it was one of 50 recordings selected by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry. It was the album that firmly established Ella Fitzgerald as one of the most memorable and influential voices in the history of American jazz, and is rightly regarded as a timeless classic.

Rating: A

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