19. Ella Fitzgerald - Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George & Ira Gershwin Songbook

Tracks:

Review:

Well here you have it – an album so long, and so self-indulgent, that it almost derailed the whole project only a month in. Which isn’t really fair to Ella Fitzgerald, I suppose; her album is a chore to listen to from end to end, but then this isn’t the sort of album you should listen to from end to end. It’s a catalogue of the music of the Gershwins! You pop it on if you want to hear “I Got Rhythm”, or leave it playing around the house. It conveniently collects the majority of their tunes into one handy package – if you consider what must have been something like a 5 x LP box set convenient.

And, amazingly enough, this all holds up pretty well. Going into detail on the individual songs would be a maddening and time-consuming task, but thankfully this set lends itself to being discussed in broad terms. And, in short, it’s generally pretty good, but not great. Well, a couple of the songs are sort of great – the explosive instrumental section of “Just Another Rhumba”, for example, and “’S Wonderful”, which is just such a happy and charming little tune. Actually, most of disc 1 is pretty good. And, you know, Ella is pretty good. Not great, but good. Maybe a little flat?

This is the George & Ira Gershwin songbook, and so the focus shouldn’t be entirely on Ella Fitzgerald. Nelson Riddle did the arrangements on this album, working with Ella for the first time, and a lot of the time the instrumentation is more compelling than the vocals. That may sound harsh, but consider this – firstly, Ira Gershwin wasn’t that great a lyricist. In fact, most of his songs could be best described as “inane”. His strength lies in very simple, emotional pleas for companionship and in jokey novelty tunes, and when he plays to that strength you get some great stuff. But then, sometimes you don’t. Although, having looked on the internet, some of these songs seem to feature alternate lyrics, which means I may not have all the evidence at hand to give him a fair trial. In any event, the songs succeed more on emotional and melodic levels than lyrically. Is anyone going to defend “Stiff Upper Lip” as anything other than an awful bit of stereotyping performed badly?

Secondly, Ella sings almost everything in a very measured and deliberate manner. This is Gershwin! It should swing more. Take “Boy Wanted”, which could have gone-off like a rocket, but which instead plods along very pretty but ultimately less than dazzling. And then, Ella’s voice isn’t placed anywhere near far enough forward in the mix, thus making it seem rather small and thin and “away in the distance”, which is a pity. But then you have the wonderful vocal glissando that opens “Soon”, or the low vocal on the pretty “Somebody from Somwhere”, which comes complete with swirling harps and begs to be performed by Judy Garland, or “A Foggy Day”, which also has a lovely little brassy bridge.

In the end, this whole album is a mixed bag. You have some good songs performed badly (“Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off”, or “The Man I Love”), some bad songs performed well (“Somebody from Somewhere”), and most of the songs are neither particularly good nor particularly bad. They are just, well, alright. The insistence of Riddle and Fitzgerald on performing every singly song in an “pop” style, adapting the material to themselves rather than themselves to the material, is a bit annoying. These are show tunes, damn it! They deserve to be swinging, trashy and rough. When Ella complained in one song that Gershwin “won’t stop pounding tin” I had absolutely no idea what they were on about. As a document of Gershwin’s music it might be argued that this fails because, ultimately, it’s far too reverential, prettying-up the tunes of a duo who’d already been canonised. Most of these songs are nothing but barely-dressed lust, and where is the sense of that? Ella does the pretty, reflective tunes well, but I just don’t know... Is it wrong to simply not like Ella Fitzgerald much? I feel guilty about it, but fuck it! This is my blog! I don’t like Ella Fitzgerald much! I think she has a fine voice but she’s a mediocre interpreter of songs.

I guess if I had to sum up, this is an album of exceptional instances and general consistency, rather than a full-on wower, but then, you can’t really expect much else can you? It’d be preposterous to assume that George and Ira Gershwin wrote only great songs, and it’d be equally idiotic to suggest that every single song that Ella Fitzgerald recorded was going to turn-out spectacular. This is an important album, because it provides a glimpse into all the strengths and weaknesses of both the Gershwin brothers and Ella Fitzgerald, and as a consequence you get a fascinating document of three of the most important figures in modern music.

8/10

Download: Ella Fitzgerald - 'S Wonderful Mp3