Starbucks to sell "new" Ella

[DukeCity]

Yeah, that's why I would classify that Christmas album (and plenty of her other output) as swinging Pop music, rather than as a disappointing Jazz record... if we have to classify. One of the things I like about that record is: No Scat Singing!!!

[JSngry]

And also, relative to others' comments about late-late Ella, I've heard a cut or two from her final album, and yeah, the voice is pretty much gone, but I got more sense of "depth" there than on a hundered or more albums where it wasn't.

[DukeCity]

Oh sure, one more singer staying too long at the fair; we listen to 'em croaking out a few more just before they croak, and we call it "depth."

[JSngry]

Well. "depth" might not be the exact word, but it's always interesting to hear what's left when there's nothing left. Sometimes there really is nothing, and sometimes there's something.

[DukeCity]

Rocky VI?

[JSngry]

Case in point:

No way in hell that it's anything other than a sad, depressing affair. There's nothing left. And yet, there's something there, something undeniable, something core. So, sad, depressing, but meaningful.

Is that realtive/parallel to Ella? Maybe, maybe not. But the tune that I most remember from that last album, "Dream A Little Dream Of Me", had some emotional something that I was not used to hearing from Ella Fitzgerald.

[DukeCity]

Yeah, I was thinking late Prez and/or late Billie Holiday. That can be some gut wrenching shit.

[Teasing the Korean]

  DukeCity said:

Yeah, that's why I would classify that Christmas album (and plenty of her other output) as swinging Pop music, rather than as a disappointing Jazz record...

And I'll take superior pop music over run-of-the-mill jazz any day...

[Dan Gould]

Well, from my perspective, there's nothing wrong per se about non-jazz fans having a few Ella CDs. As for me, I will never stop enjoying the Ella and Louis albums. Has anyone heard These Are the Blues? I thought Jim might reference it since I sent him a burn many years ago. Maybe its one of those "more than just a few" things he does dig.

Edited May 17, 2007 by Dan Gould

[Larry Kart]

Glad you mentioned "Ella and Louis," Dan. There's some great singing there from both of them. Louis brought out the best in Ella, as did the Ellington people and material on that set in a somewhat different way. In both cases, it's as though the pressure was off. BTW, I met Ella once, when I presented a Down Beat award to her on the stage of some Chicago hotel nightclub, and she seemed to me to be shy to the point of it being pathological -- at least on the part of an entertainer who had been in the public eye for so many years (this was in 1968-9). I was pretty nervous myself when I came out from the wings to give her the award plaque, but she looked and acted as though she were about to be executed.

Edited May 17, 2007 by Larry Kart

[ep1str0phy]

Re: remixes--the recently-released Impulse reworkings aren't all that bad, but there are some extremely questionable artistic decisions locked up in there. The "Mondo Grosso Next Wave Remix" of Shepp's "Blues For Brother George Jackson" does some interesting things with one of the sax solos, but this raving, ub-chick-ub-chick jungle beat is just weaksauce up against the original groove (fortunately they sort of leave the turnaround alone, but not enough...).

And Duke--there's probably more technically, if not thematically, in the recent Rocky than all the Rockys after II and prior to VI. Then again, Rocky IV had the Russian Premier doing that 80's slow hand clap thing, so... (also: Rocky outruns a car. In the snow.)

[etherbored]

  Quote

Has anyone heard These Are the Blues?

hear, hear. that recording gets a singular thumbs up, imho.

there's vital and visceral, then there's been there and done that.

these are the blues falls into the former.

[paul secor]

  JSngry said:

Case in point:

No way in hell that it's anything other than a sad, depressing affair. There's nothing left. And yet, there's something there, something undeniable, something core. So, sad, depressing, but meaningful.

Is that realtive/parallel to Ella? Maybe, maybe not. But the tune that I most remember from that last album, "Dream A Little Dream Of Me", had some emotional something that I was not used to hearing from Ella Fitzgerald.

Haven't heard Ella's last album, but I agree with you on Sirius. "So sad, depressing, but meaningful" says it all.

Another case in point - Billie: Lady in Satin. It took a long time for me to be able to hear it, but I'm glad that I kept listening.

[Hot Ptah]

I am scratching my head about all of the reservations and negative comments about Ella here. It goes to show that informed people have different opinions and tastes, which is fine, and how it should be. I love virtually all of the Ella I have heard, live and on album, find her singing often very moving, feel a deep emotional content in almost everything that she has recorded, love her Christmas album without reservation, and love her scat singing--and I like not very much scat singing in general.

What is it that some of you don't hear, or respond to? There is a human wellspring of emotion in her work that I can definitely feel, which some others here obviously don't. My emotional vibe must be tuned to the same frequency as Ella's, and it must be a fairly rare one.

Again, there is nothing negative about that--I believe that well informed people of good faith may have very different opinions about artists, and that this makes things interesting.

Edited May 17, 2007 by Hot Ptah

[RDK]

  Hot Ptah said:

I am scratching my head about all of the reservations and negative comments about Ella here. It goes to show that informed people have different opinions and tastes, which is fine, and how it should be. I love virtually all of the Ella I have heard, live and on album, find her singing often very moving, feel a deep emotional content in almost everything that she has recorded, love her Christmas album without reservation, and love her scat singing--and I like not very much scat singing in general.

I agree. Ella was my favorite female jazz singer for many years - since eclipsed by Dinah W - but her songbooks series remains just about perfect. Her singing on the Cole Porter Songbook is especially memorable for me, but I don't think I've heard any truly bad Ella.

[etherbored]

  Quote

What is it that some of you don't hear, or respond to?

at one time or another, i've owned, if not the complete ella catalog, certainly a majority of it (there were some out there/now sound pop records that i didn't own). it's just that, for my tastes, while ella is spot on in her own buoyant way, much of her material just doesn't connect with me beyond a (and this sounds worse than i mean it to) superficial level. that's due in no small part to the pristine clarity of her diction and delivery, something that's actually been seen as a double-edge in the circles i came up in.

ps: i hope this isn't seen as "negative", because it's certainly not intended to be.

Edited May 17, 2007 by etherbored

[Hot Ptah]

  etherbored said:

  Quote

What is it that some of you don't hear, or respond to?

at one time or another, i've owned, if not the complete ella catalog, certainly a majority of it (there were some out there/now sound pop records that i didn't own). it's just that, for my tastes, while ella is spot on in her own buoyant way, much of her material just doesn't connect with me beyond a (and this sounds worse than i mean it to) superficial level. that's due in no small part to the pristine clarity of her diction and delivery, something that's actually been seen as a double-edge in the circles i came up in.

ps: i hope this isn't seen as "negative", because it's certainly not intended to be.

I know what you mean about the pristine clarity of her diction and delivery. I have a good sized collection of pre-1945 acoustic rural blues, which tend to be dominated by less than perfect diction and a lot of raw emotion.

I find a lot of emotion in Ella's singing too, although of a different flavor than Charlie Patton or Blind Willie Johnson, to be sure.

[Teasing the Korean]

I have a decent amount of Ella and admittedly don't listen to her often. Still, there is some quality about her singing - especially on the live stuff - that brings tears to my eyes when I least expect it. Also, from a technical standpoint, it seems that on the live stuff she's able to sound both raspy and crystal clear simultaneously, and the more she goes, the better her voice gets. Someone said earlier that her interpretations of ballads lacked, but I think select ballads of hers, such as "Get Out of Town," "So in Love" and "Isn't it a Pity," are very moving and heartfelt. And I wish she was paired with better arrangers on the Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart songbook albums.

[etherbored]

that songbook series. it was the best of times/it was the worst of times. likewise, i love those records, regardless of how differently they could have been arranged to make more of ella's voice. that series, more than maybe anything else in her catalog, was carefully engineered for mass market appeal. i mean, if my parents had those records...

nonetheless, they are a definite zenith in the genre of the popular american songbook.

[Teasing the Korean]

  etherbored said:

... that series, more than maybe anything else in her catalog, was carefully engineered for mass market appeal...

Yes, but what's ironic is that there were vocalists with wider audiences than Ella (at the time) who had more interesting arrangements than what is heard on the Cole Porter/R&H sets. Not sure what was going on there...

[JSngry]

The thing that I too often take away from an Ella performance is that it's not quite "honest", and I think that Larry's notation of her perceived almost-pathological shyness plays to this. By all accounts (that I've read), she was a "complicated" person whose music was not often (enough for my tastes) reflective of anything but hey-it's-a-happy-swinging-life-I-got-no-worries-or-cares, when the reality for her was most likely anything but.

Now, avoidance of pain (and/or other realities) through music has an honorable, at times even great, traditiion, but usually it's built upon either a level of escapism that's un/super-naturally grander in scope that that from which escape is being attempted, or else it's just batshit loony. Ella never really went in either direction. It seems to me that she built this world of "perfect" singing and stayed inside it with an almost fearful determination to let nothing come neither in nor out of it, as if her singing was her shell to protect her against "bigger" non-musical issues against which she had no resources to cope.

It's not quite a case of "arrested adolescence" as was the case with Brian Wilson (who, god bless him, created works that were both un/super-naturally grander in scope that that from which he was trying to escape escape, and that were just batshit loony). It's more of a case of a severe case of emotional agoraphobia finding its sole functionality through a truly beautiful voice, and it's because that voice was so beautiful, indeed, perfect, that criticism of her work is not something that I can offer untempered. Because dammit, the woman was a great "singer". I just find too much of a conflict (usually) between what I hear and what I feel and what I think/know I should be hearing and feeling to ultimately be satisfied. The blues album Dan mentioned is a case in point. It is, perhaps unwittingly, the most "naked" Ella I've heard, and it is a fascinating jumble of skittish contradictions - one second (and when I say "second", I mean it almost literally) down & dirty, the next all polite, never really settling into one "true" personality on a simple blues date. It's as if she can't make up her mind who she wants to "be", again, on a simple (or, apparently in her case, not so simple) blues date. Clearly, this was a woman of deep internal contradictions. Is it possible that, deep inside, Ella was more twisted/tortured than Billie? I'd not jump to an answer too quickly... If it would have been asking too much to have a person of her "stature" play out her psychodramas in her music, I don't think it's at all unfair to note & respond to the resultant feelings stirred within by wondering, with total disregard to all things Memorexian, "Is it real? Or is it Ella?"

Sure, she had a beautiful voice, impeccable technique, and quite often was able to put them to use to create some wondefully perfect sounding music that really asks for nothing more than to be heard as such. And it's hard for me to argue against that music on those terms alone - Richard Davis was right, I think, to do what he did in that class. But I feel like an "enabler" of sorts by doing so, if not to her (hell, she's dead & I never even knew anybody who knew somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody who saw her getting into a car somewhere), then to the notion that "perfect" and "beautiful" are enough by themself. They'll make for "good music", sure, and that's nothing to sneeze at. But "honesty" & "emotion" inevitable come into the mix at some point if for no other reason than that somebody always brings them into the mix, sometimes unpleasantly & unwelcomely so, and you gotta either deal with it or avoid it completely. I'm not saying that Ella avoided it completely. But I'm not saying that she really dealt with it either, and its not like I can't hear/feel that there was something "else" inside her. Her "happyhappyjoyjoy" persona is just not one that rings true to me, and her "sophiticated/elegant" persona, as "perfect" as it often is, seems more a shield than an expression.

The question is inevitably posed - do we have a "right" to "expect" more of an artist than they are willing to give up, or should we just "accept" it for what it is? Yes, and yes, and that, since you asked, is the greatest source of my ambivalence - not hate, mind you, but a strong sense of ambivalence - towards the legacy of Ella Fitzgerald.

Edited May 17, 2007 by JSngry

[etherbored]

as thorough a dissertation as we're likely to find on this forum.

are you a professor @ ntsu or wtf?

fwiw, we are to accept an atist and their contributions at face value. to anything but is to pointlessly soil the magic of any artistry.

otoh, to posthumously discuss and analyze the careers of the cornerstones of the genre is healthy. it allows many of us deeper understanding and perspective.

[JSngry]

Not a professor, just a guy who's listened & thunk about this music & its peoples long enough to have some fairly well-formed options. Anybody can do it, really. All it takes is time (which you can't do anything about) & willingness (which you can do something about). But thanks for the kind words.

However, I gotta take some issue with this:

  Quote

we are to accept an atist and their contributions at face value. to anything but is to pointlessly soil the magic of any artistry.

That's a wise route towards "appreciation", but it'll quickly get you on the road to nowhere in terms of "meaning", what is, what something means to you personally. I'm all for appreciation, and I see a lot of dissing (not just here, but everywhere) that (seemingly) totally disgards and/or marginalizes the very real accomplishments of craft and other things relevant to appreciating something "on its own terms", and that, I think, is dangerously close to the self-indulgence of destruction for the enjoyment of destruction.

But otoh, if you can really find some meaning for you yourself personally in something, no matter how "good" it might be, then what? Is it cool to just accept without at some point examining? I don't think so, if for no other reason than that leaves us open to, at worst, "programming", cultural brainwashing, whatever you want to call it, the wholesale buying into somebody else's definition of what it means to be "us", which is really telling you what it means to be you, and who but yourself has the right to decide that?

That's worst case. Best case is that we don't really give ourselves the chance to grow by asking ourselves some questions along the way. Nothing necessarily "wrong" with that, some people don't want/need to grow, and yeah, ok, but...

All I'm saying is that "appreciation" & "meaning" are two different things, neither to be taken lightly. Sometimes they reinforce each other, sometimes they pull at opposite ends. You just never know how that's going to work out. But - neither is sufficient by itself, and neither should be nurtured (or supressed) at the expense of the otehr.

[Lazaro Vega]

"I have yet to hear a convincing Ella interpretation of a truly sad or angry song full of despair."

"Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered"

[Hot Ptah]

JSngry, I respect your analysis. I don't feel the same way about Ella, and don't agree with you. But that is fine. It would be boring if everyone agreed with you.

What I would love to read is an analysis from you, similar to what you did for David Murray's playing, on the playing of:

David S. Ware

Charles Gayle