Off the Shelf: Ella Fitzgerald

The CD plucked off the shelf this week is another cheap disc I picked up during my high school days:  Ella Fitzgerald: Flying Home.  It is a compilation of recordings of the great jazz singer.  The liner notes are lacking (that is, there aren't any) so I had to do a bit of fact-checking.  The second track on the disc is a song that is now virtually owned by Fitzgerald: How High the Moon (it is also one of about three songs that I've ever done the karoake thing to.  Tee hee.)  There is a story behind the scat-singing on that track, but as I haven't found a documented source of that story yet, I can't tell you whether it's true or not.  The story goes like this:  During a concert, performing said song, Ella forgets the lyrics, and so makes them up.  However, other accounts tell me that she didn't forget the words, but instead uses the tune as a way of forging and refining her style to integrate into the bepop scene (she in fact, quotes several bars of Charlie Parker's Ornithology, a song that shares the chord progression with How High the Moon).  Ella fully embraced the bebop movement.

The nonsense syllables are called "scatting," and are similar to the non-lexical vocables that we learned about with Mr. Trololo (see the post about Trolololo-ing).  It is a technique that requires the singer to impersonate musical instruments.  Fitzgerald happened to be very good at this, and she used it extensively in her later recordings.

She had a consistently successful career as a jazz singer, her lovely voice contributing to recordings of covers of songs by Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Johnny Mercer, Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, and Duke Ellington.  She worked a lot with Louis Armstrong, recording several albums with him.  On the 3rd track of my cheap CD is Basin Street Blues, she does an impersonation of Armstrong's distinctive singing voice.  He sings with her on A Foggy Day and Moonlight in Vermont, and you can hear his trumpet skillfully navigating the changes on several other tracks.

I suspect the recordings of Oh Lady Be Good and How High the Moon are the famous 1947 versions, and the Flying Home track was recorded in 1945.  My personal favourites are Angel Eyes and Lullaby of Birdland, two songs that always made me dream of becoming a jazz singer (Peggy Lee has had the same effect on me).  But I can't scat sing.  At least not with the ease, inventiveness, and grace of Ella.  In 1987, she was presented with the much-deserved National Medal of Arts, and a few years later France awarded her their Commander of Arts and Letters award.

Ella Fitzgerald left this world on June 15, 1996.  She was 79 years old.