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Pure Ella: The Very Best of Ella Fitzgerald
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Best Of Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong
: essential recording:Ella Fitzgerald's voice was satin to Louis Armstrong's sandpaper, but when you put them together on a single song, their chemistry was unimpeachable. This disc selects highlights from the three albums they made together at Verve (including their Porgy and Bess), and adds a spiffy live track from the Hollywood Bowl. Though they don't harmonize much (Armstrong's voice wasn't built for harmony), Ella's dignified swing and flashes of teasing wit play off Satchmo's gritty, good-humored roar symbiotically. ...
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Ella Fitzgerald Sings The Cole Porter Songbook
: :Long considered a jewel in Verve Records' very impressive crown, Fitzgerald's songbook collections of various composers--a series that was started by the success of this set--are all wonderful, but her natural wit and intelligence was at its most perfect with Cole Porter's erudite, urbane songs. While not as scat-oriented as her small group outings, these Porter sets offer her most realized pop performances. Also, the gold remastering does a fine job of bringing out the nuances in the arrangements, ...
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The Best of the Song Books
: :Trying to cull a single-CD 'Best of' from the 16-CD set of The Complete Ella Fitzgerald Song Books may seem like a daunting task, but it's also foolproof. The complete set is a monument to the century's greatest songs and, arguably, its greatest singer, and this selection is a series of gems programmed to simulate a Fitzgerald performance, carefully sequencing joyous uptempo swingers and moving ballads. Recorded between 1956 and 1964, Fitzgerald's finest years, the CD includes arrangements by ...
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The Complete Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong
: :Trying to cull a single-CD 'Best of' from the 16-CD set of The Complete Ella Fitzgerald Song Books may seem like a daunting task, but it's also foolproof. The complete set is a monument to the century's greatest songs and, arguably, its greatest singer, and this selection is a series of gems programmed to simulate a Fitzgerald performance, carefully sequencing joyous uptempo swingers and moving ballads. Recorded between 1956 and 1964, Fitzgerald's finest years, the CD includes arrangements by ...
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Ella and Louis
: :What we have here is the mating of honey and molasses. Or is it the sound of melted butter over gravel? Never mind--sweeter, more joyous music has never been recorded (although the follow-up, Ella and Louis Again, may be even better). You can't listen to these two without smiling. It's such an inevitable pairing that you wonder what titanic forces of nature could have kept Ella and Satchmo apart until they made this record together in 1957, accompanied by ...
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The Complete Ella Fitzgerald Song Books
:Album Description:16 CD limited edition box set release to commerorate her 75th birthday. :This 16-CD set collects all of Ella Fitzgerald's Songbooks, a monumental tribute to the American popular song and its greatest composers, recorded for Verve between 1956 and 1964. There is likely no other singer possessed of the mix of talents that Fitzgerald brought to the project, a combination of sheer vocal technique, creativity in phrasing and rhythm, and fidelity to lyrics and intent. The sheer scale ...
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Porgy & Bess
: :Getting the two most personable voices in jazz to sing an hour's worth of George Gershwin's opera Porgy & Bess (Ella doing all the female parts, Satchmo all the male) was a good idea, but not quite as great as it sounded. Armstrong savors the down-and-dirty Charlestonisms that inspired the cadences of the music and lyrics, and they fit his happy rasp like an old shoe; Fitzgerald, conversely, sounds almost prissy every time she has to sing the word ...
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Oh, Lady, Be Good! Best of the Gershwin Songbook
: essential recording:Ella recorded five LPs' worth of Gershwin tunes for her songbook series, which was frankly a little much, so this single disc skims the cream. These songs are the ur-texts of American pre-war pop, straightforward love songs made to flow off a singer's tongue, and here they're in the hands of a master. Nelson Riddle's arrangements tend toward the soupy side--the bombastic string sections are distinctly nonjazz--but Ella, as always, sings with absolute taste and authority. She ...
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Pure Ella
: essential recording:The flawless lyricism of Ellis Larkins's piano provides an ideal frame for Ella Fitzgerald's maturing art on the two sessions that make up this CD. The first, from 1950, is an all-Gershwin program, while the second, from 1954, includes songs from other masters of the popular ballad, like Sammy Kahn, Cole Porter, and Hoagy Carmichael. Fitzgerald's voice was an ineffable combination of breadth of sound and lightness of delivery. Larkins's spare and sympathetic settings let her caress ...
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