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Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong: Ella and Louis Again |
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Friday, 27 January 2006 07:01 |
Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong
Ella and Louis Again
Verve Records
By John Sinclair
Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong together again: Sounds like a good idea! It's the Summer of 1957, and producer Norman Granz had struck paydirt with his initial pairing of these two giants of jazz in a setting which kept the spotlight tightly focused on their masterful singing of the American popular song. And now, for this welcome sequel, Louis and Ella were ready to work their way through another well-chosen program of pop standards, buoyed and propelled by the incomparably sensitive support of the Oscar Peterson Trio with guitarist Herb Ellis and bassist Ray Brown plus drummer Louis Bellson.
While the heyday of swing had long been eclipsed by the ascendancy of bebop and the birth of the cool, Ella and Louis and their supple ensemble simply ignore the passage of time in these three mid- 50s sessions and swing the music so naturally and effortlessly as to present somewhat of a textbook example of how this music is supposed to sound no matter when or where it's played. Each song the principals sing is gently lifted out of its original context as a Broadway show tune, movie musical number or Tin Pan Alley favorite and firmly re-rooted in the inexhaustibly rich musical soil of the African American cultural experience, bringing additional layers of meaning, feeling, artistry and rhythmic intelligence to even the most improbable material.
Where the rare selections presented for their interpretation have been drawn from the jazz literature the Benny Goodman features Don t Be That Way and Stompin at the Savoy and the Don Redman-Andy Razaf classic, Gee, Baby, Ain t I Good to You? the music and performances are beautifully integrated into a fully pleasing entirety that rewards the attentive listener with everything that's good about jazz. Indeed, on Stompin Ms. Fitzgerald, who was herself a top attraction at the Savoy Ballroom as singer with the fabulous Chick Webb Orchestra early in her career, needs little prodding from Pops to really cut loose with a vocal improvisation that takes the song to a whole new place and propels the performance well beyond the premises of this project. Armstrong contributes a blistering trumpet solo, and everything is really swinging.
On the pop numbers that predominate these sessions, however, there's an almost palpable tension between the singers and the material which provides a compelling subtext to the superlative performances of some of America's best-known songs by two of the most skilled and expressive vocalists our nation has produced. Oscar Peterson and the ensemble offer accompaniment throughout that is always perfectly balanced, exquisitely relaxed, unobtrusive and tasteful. But the singers frequently can be heard struggling to come up with a convincing reading of the often transparently inane lyrics, sounding at times like observers from another planet confronted with the bizarre fantasies of an alien civilization, then shrugging their queer shoulders and digging into the songs with as much professionalism as they can muster.
In fact, what impresses most throughout this collection of pop chestnuts is the persistent artistry and unfailing good humor of the musical protagonists as they work their way through set after set of improbable lyrics composed by pop tunesmiths with a completely different cast of characters in mind. Makin Whoopee, They All Laughed, I Won t Dance, Comes Love, Autumn in New York, Let's Call the Whole Thing Off, These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You), I ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm, I m Puttin All My Eggs in One Basket, A Fine Romance, I Get a Kick Out of You every one of these numbers seems to have been written to be sung by some dewy-eyed alabaster ingenue or clean-cut white guy with a severely limited experience of life outside his particular social class. Here, instead, the songs and their insipid scenarios are delivered by a pair of mature, worldly-wise African American refugees from the ghetto who have come by their musical mastery and their experience of American life from an entirely different perspective.
The juxtaposition of the distinctly African American identity of these two titans of the jazz idiom with such studiously contrived lyrics coming from the heart of the popular music mainstream makes for a particularly provocative listening experience. To hear, for example, the extremely worldly Louis Armstrong, a product of the most licentious precincts of turn-of-the-20th-century New Orleans whose own mother is reputed to have worked as a prostitute, as he bravely negotiates the cutesy double-entendres of Cole Porter's Let's Do It requires more than merely the customary suspension of disbelief. From his warbling of the goofy introductory verse through his tortured grappling with the main text of the song, Pops is clearly trying to make the best of a bad situation. Other passages, like Pops asserting that Autumn in New York transforms the slums into Mayfair, are almost startling in their incongruity.
But Ella and Louis, still functioning at the time of these sessions at the sustained peak of their artistic powers, consistently overcome such textual obstacles with the sheer power and grace of their consummate sense of swing, They approach every piece with dignity and charm, enhancing the texts with the full force of their personalities and bending the music to their will, and Armstrong further brightens the proceedings from time to time with a chorus or two of his shining trumpet. They swing everything from within, at whatever tempo, with warmth and precision, turning each song into a shapely gem of considerable musical beauty.
It's hard to believe in the world of today, but America was once a very swinging place. Fifty, sixty, seventy-five years ago, from the beginning of the Jazz Age in the 20s to the end of the Second World War, swing music ruled America from bottom to top. The Prophet of Swing and its very embodiment, Mr. Louis Daniel Armstrong of New Orleans, Chicago and New York City, not only established the relaxed, elastic, rhythmically intelligent approach to making music that would be characterized as swing, but his brilliant recordings and compelling performances propelled swing music beyond its wellsprings in the African American communities of the South and straight into the mainstream of American popular music.
Indeed, during the period of Armstrong's greatest ascendancy in the 1930s, swing was America's popular music, and the supple rhythms of swing insinuated themselves into every aspect of American life. Even the squares were swinging to the music of Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, the Dorsey brothers and other popular purveyors of the danceable sound. The rhythmic powerhouses led by Earl Fatha Hines, Jimmie Lunceford, Benny Carter, Lionel Hampton and Chick Webb lit up the urban bastions of racial segregation where the nation's African American citizenry was forced to dwell, and their recordings dominated the neighborhood jukeboxes and the race records charts as a result.
Louis Armstrong had been swinging from the jump, first as a teen-aged trumpet man in the streets of the Crescent City and on the Mississippi River steamboats during the years of the First World War and then in the nightclubs and theatres of the South Side of Chicago, where he had been summoned by his mentor, Joe King Oliver, to join Oliver's Creole Jazz Band in 1922. It was Armstrong's example as a soloist and improviser with driving rhythm and a head full of ideas that inspired a whole generation of jazz players of every sort and helped turn on America to the concept and practice of swing as a way of life.
Armstrong established himself so firmly in the 20s with his recordings first with Oliver, then his own Hot 5 and Hot 7 sides, his accompaniments to a wide variety of singers and his early big-band sessions and with his warm, effusive personality that he was one of the few jazz artists of the decade to survive the dark years of the Great Depression with his popularity intact. When the good times started to come around again in the mid- 30s, Louis was a bigger star than ever, and swinging his big band with his trumpet and vocals like never before. His mature style was now well set, and he would wield his hard-won mastery of the music with greater and greater success for the rest of his long career.
By the time of his duets with Ella, Louis had played a prominent role in the progression and popular acceptance of jazz and swing in America and around the world for more than 30 years. Easily the best-known name (and face) in all of jazz, Armstrong enjoyed wide acclaim with mid-century audiences by virtue of his all-star sextet, frequent television appearances and State Department-sponsored tours of foreign lands, in honor of which he had become known to millions of Americans as Ambassador Satch. By no means a modernist, Pops had kept pace with the changing times in his own sweet way and was never moved from his central place in the mainstream of American popular entertainment.
Ella Fitzgerald, who could quite properly be titled the Queen of Swing (although such a designation seems not to have been utilized), was every bit as much at the top of her game as her singing partner. A generation younger than Mr. Armstrong, Ms. Fitzgerald had been discovered as an Amateur Night contest-winner at the Apollo Theatre and came to prominence as featured vocalist with the hard-hitting Chick Webb Orchestra, the house band at the world-famous Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. After Webb's untimely demise, Ella took over the band and made a string of hit singles that served to establish her preeminence.
A pure product of the Swing Era, Ms. Fitzgerald embraced the musical innovations of the modern jazz movement of the 40s and enriched her vocal palette with the sophisticated harmonies and rhythmic advances developed by the bebop pioneers. She played Carnegie Hall with the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra, toured with Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic troupe and rose to the top of the jazz world in the 50s with her own impeccable trio and a series of well-focused albums dedicated to exploring the works of popular American songwriters. Like Armstrong, she was also known for her wildly imaginative scat singing and her unfailing ability to swing any set of notes she got her fabulous pipes around.
So here they are, Ella and Louis again, blending and contrasting their matchless voices and marvelously relaxed approach to the music, slow-dancing and romping their way through a few more well-worn pages from the pop songbook and putting their stamp on everything they sing. There's no hurry, no worry, nothing but beautifully swinging music sung and played with perfect taste from start to finish. Louis goes it alone on Makin Whoopee, Let's Do It, Willow Weep for Me and I Get a Kick Out of You ; Ella has Comes Love, These Foolish Things and Ill Wind to herself; and they work in tandem on all the others, while Pops brings his trumpet to bear on Autumn in New York, Willow Weep for Me, Love Is Here to Stay, Learnin the Blues, and the utterly delightful Stompin at the Savoy and Gee, Baby, Ain t I Good to You?
Now there's nothing left to do but sit back, slip this disk into your player, prepare your favorite libation and enjoy the sound of two of the greatest, most distinctive jazz voices of all time having a ball with each other, their superlative rhythm section and a set of well-crafted, time-tested musical material. It doesn t come any better than this.
New Orleans
October 25, 2002
(c) 2002, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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