Ella Fitzgerald, one of NPR's 50 Great Voices.
In case you haven't noticed, we're suckers for ambitious and unintentionally comment-baiting series at NPR Music. Our latest is 50 Great Voices, but we'd be hard-pressed to find many people who'd disagree with today's 10th entry: Ella Fitzgerald. In her piece, NPR special correspondent Susan Stamberg talked with Manhattan Transfer member Janis Siegel, as well as former NPR jazz host Billy Taylor, but here Stamberg offers her own Ella Fitzgerald memory:
I remember when Ella's first American Popular Songbook album came out in 1956: The Cole Porter Songbook... on LP! She'd signed a year earlier with Norman Granz, the jazz impresario who became her manager and producer, and recorded her on his Verve label. The Cole Porter LP was an instant and enormous hit.
It was also a revolution. No jazz singer had taken on such an encyclopedic task before. I was just a kid, and couldn't afford to actually buy the album. But my best friend's older sister — who played wonderful jazz piano — had saved up her allowance, and invested in that landmark album. More than that, Amy kindly loaned it to me after she'd committed each note to memory. Once it was on my phonograph, I also tucked away every single note.
I loved Ella's sweet, direct approach to each tune. Many of the Porter songs were new to me, and I was thrilled to encounter them for the first time. After a week or so of daily multi-playing, Amy's LP was worn down almost to a nub. It's lucky that all those albums (after Porter, she sang through Rodgers and Hart, Ellington, Berlin, Gershwin, Arlen, Kern and Mercer!) are now on CD. It means they'll be with us for the ages.
[50 Great Voices: Ella Fitzgerald: America's First Lady Of Song]
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