Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong: Advent Calendar of Song: Day Fourteen
Advent Calendar of Song: Day Fourteen
I will have further challenges to your comfort zones.Not today, though.
Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1991) is one of the central singers of the twentieth century, especially in the Songbook double LPs she recorded of Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hart, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington, Harold Arlen, and others. Decades after her death, we hear her in cafés everywhere, chiefly in those songbooks.
Those recordings are classics (though the band arrangements, especially for Rodgers and Hart, are sometimes irksome). They’re also classical: Ella so trusts the music that she simply lays it before us without any apparent effort at interpretation, letting it speak for itself, showing us why the composer placed this syllable on that note. There are other wonderful singers who “make more” of the songs, or maybe impose more of themselves on the songs - try my beloved Lee Wiley (1908-1975) in Gershwin and Porter. (She drove Ira Gershwin nuts by changing “’Swonderful” into “It’s wonderful,” but she’s so vivid in everything she touches.) By contrast, Ella, with her wonderfully steady breathing, reminds me of the very different Kirsten Flagstad, the great Wagnerian soprano, whose breathing launched calmly vast notes like ocean breakers. When Flagstad was younger, she really pointed her words and showed her intensity. As she got older, however, she seemed to do less, or to let the words and music do her work for her: it’s fascinating how she proved that less was more. Thus with Ella. Another classical singer she reminds me of is the astounding soprano Nellie Melba, a seemingly “cold” singer whose delivery is so pure and clean that the effect can be stone-cold and white-hot at the same time.
But there are many Ellas. There’s the enchanting young Ella of her gleeful early recordings, there’s the Songbook Ella just showing us the essence of the song; there’s the playful but incandescent Ella of the great live concerts in Rome and Berlin, knocking off scat like operatic mad scenes (comic madness). Best of all, I believe, is Ella the blissful colleague: Ella with the Inkspots, Ella with the Mills Brothers, Ella with Oscar Peterson, and – a supreme partnership – Ella and Louis Armstrong (1901-1971). If you don’t know their 1956 album “Ella and Louis”, treat yourself. (It’s all on YouTube.)
As an example of the art that conceals art, I give you Ella with Louis, singing and playing “Moonlight in Vermont” in 1956: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8HgdIJ_i7k . This is a 1944 song by John M. Blackburn (lyrics) and Karl Suessdorf (music). You can hear its original singer, Margaret Whiting, on YouTube in her original 1944 recording (she’s good); you can hear the fabulous Jo Stafford in her 1950s recording, curiously changing some words here and there (she’s better); you can hear Rosemary Clooney, also in 1956 (lovely but actually over-affectionate to the music; borderline-sentimental); you can hear Frank Sinatra usurp it (approaching notes from below, as is his wont – you won’t catch him in this Calendar). Ella seems to pare everything away just to words, melody, and quiet; and that quiet mood - gentler than any other recording - immediately makes this the classic rendition. Louis, so different in surface style, is absolutely in the same underlying mood. I very much like the song's words (and I like Jo Hammond's alternative words too!).
Pennies in a stream <“Frozen winter stream” in Jo Hammond’s version>
Falling leaves, a sycamore <”Withered leaves, a sycamore” in JH>
Moonlight in Vermont
Icy finger-waves
Ski trails on a mountainside
Snowlight in Vermont
Telegraph cables, they sing down the highway
And travel each bend in the road
People who meet in this romantic setting
Are so hypnotized by the lovely
Ev´ning summer breeze <JH: ”Shadows through the trees”>
Warbling of a meadowlark <JH: Snowdrifts shining in the dark”>
Moonlight in Vermont
<Telegraph cables, how they sing down the highway
And they travel each bend in the road…>
…You and I and moonlight in Vermont.
The more you listen, the less detached Ella seems, for all her gentleness. She’s so clean in her entry into notes, so relaxed in how she lets the upper and lower parts of her voice give their own colours to the phrases (letting the music speak for itself); everything is dolcissimo. The vibrato on individual notes is so lightly natural you don’t think about it, but check out how she softens her voice for the first “Vermont” and for “mountainside” to make them yet more intimate. Every phrase-ending is a subtly different event. What about that tiny flourish she adds to “summer” (“evening summer breeze”)? And how she then adds more such jazz touches when she repeats the words: the ups and downs of “Telegraph/ cables they/ sing down the/ highway” are so magical, and then the upward ascent into “Evening summer breeze”). Heavenly stuff, all of it. Please don’t fail to love this.
