Ella Fitzgerald: Forever Fresh

‘Roy Eldridge Quintet – Ella Fitzgerald Quintet In Concert: Falkoner Centret, Copenhagen, Denmark, May 21, 1959’ (Steeplechase Records) Every time a new concert by Ella Fitzgerald is released, my first thought is somewhat cynical. I was able to see the First Lady of Song only once live in performance, at the very end of her career, but I have heard — devoured is the better word — dozens if not hundreds of Fitzgerald concert recordings released from all over the world. So whenever I get my hands on a previously unreleased live performance, I can’t help but ponder: How can yet another “new” concert actually tell me anything new? I’m always wrong to do so. Every time I listen to one of these concerts, I hear something that I’ve never heard before. That’s certainly true of the latest Fitzgerald show to cross my doorstep.First, it does confirm what we already knew — that Fitzgerald was simply incapable of delivering an inferior performance, and that every single concert of hers in reasonably good audio quality is something I want to hear and own. This is a particularly interesting show. It features pianist Lou Levy and guitarist Herb Ellis, who worked with Fitzgerald on several tours in 1958-59 and then again for some classic concerts in 1961, along with longtime bassist Wilfred Middlebrooks and drummer Gus Johnson. There are several standards that entered her repertoire through the songbook albums, some from side projects, like “You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me,” which Marty Paich had arranged for her 1958 album “Ella Swings Lightly.”Sometimes these concerts surprise with contemporary pop songs that we don’t expect to hear Ella sing, as in 1957 with the Guy Mitchell hit “Singin’ the Blues” at Stockholm and Paris. Here there are a couple of newish show tunes that are somewhat unusual, “Too Close For Comfort,” from Sammy Davis’s Broadway hit “Mr. Wonderful,” and “Whatever Lola Wants,” from “Damn Yankees.” They’re followed by a powerful, fast, uptempo blues that on the track list is given as “Alright Okay You Win,” but that actually turns out to be “Roll ’Em Pete” — though when Fitzgerald sang it, in dedication to Joe Williams and Count Basie, it’s almost always listed on her album covers as “Joe Williams’s Blues.” Listening to both “Whatever Lola Wants” and her signature “How High the Moon” here, it dawns on me for the first time that Fitzgerald had a unique way of stepping outside a song as she was singing it — something that virtually no other singer of jazz, pop, or any other genre ever did. She would not only sing the song, she would describe it, almost as if she was observing it from another viewpoint, sort of in the third person. Famously, in “How High the Moon” she tells us, “We’re singin’ it, ’cuz you asked for it….” This version of “Lola,” set in a Cuban clave, is amazing: After the first chorus, she slightly changes course and tells without missing a beat, “Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets, and Lola wants to do the mambo. And so we’ll take another song from ‘Damn Yankees’ and sing it for you.” Then she shifts abruptly into “Who’s Got the Pain?” from that same score. She sang “Lola” several more times later on, but never repeated the interpolation of the second song.Likewise, while in the middle of “Roll ’Em Pete” (or whatever they call it here), she starts to pay tribute to her blues-singing colleagues: “Nobody sings the blues like Dinah Washington.” She also describes Joe Williams as “the singin’est, swingin’est blues singer in all the land.” Nobody but Fitzgerald could be standing both inside and outside of a song at the same time, most famously in the classic 1960 Berlin concert when she sings about not being able to remember the lyrics to “Mack the Knife.”The set ends with more songbook standards, including “Lady Be Good,” which she had recently reconfigured from a fast scat tour-de-force to a romantic ballad for her “George and Ira Gershwin Songbook,” to be released that fall; this is apparently the live debut of the slow version. From there, she slows down even further into Gershwin’s “I Loves You Porgy” (yes, from “Porgy and Bess”). Then she ends with her epic extravaganza of scat, “How High the Moon.” Amazingly, the Falkoner concert — which opens with two instrumentals featuring Roy Eldridge leading the quartet — isn’t at all special in terms of Fitzgerald’s overall career. It’s just another night on the road, another stop on the tour. I’m sure I’ll listen to the whole thing a few hundred times more until someone releases the next “new” Ella concert recording. After all, she’s singing it because we asked for it.

Ella Fitzgerald: Forever Fresh

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