Ella Fitzgerald
was masterful in any musical format, but there was something especially
luminous about her singing alone with a piano. This was clear when pianist
Ellis Larkins was first asked to work with her for her 1950 album, Ella Sings
Gershwin. "Larkins said he strongly believed that piano accompaniment
alone would best serve the singer's extraordinary talents," NPR wrote in
2008. "She just loved singing with Ellis," producer Milt Gabler said
in 1990. The result was a delicacy of 1950s vocal jazz, revealing that Fitzgerald—a
three-octave dynamo—was just as brilliant without any bells and whistles.
The Gershwin album did so well that Fitzgerald reunited with
Larkins for a second voice-and-piano album in 1954, Songs In A Mellow Mood,
which consisted of a variety of iconic Great American Songbook standards.
Fitzgerald found massive success with her signature series of lush, orchestral
Song Book releases, but throughout her long and illustrious career, she would
occasionally return to the intimate format of just voice and piano. While she
peppered 1956's Ella Fitzgerald Sings The Cole Porter Song Book and 1957's Ella
Fitzgerald Sings The Duke Ellington Song Book with a couple piano duets, 1960's
Ella Fitzgerald Sings Songs From Let No Man Write My Epitaph, featuring songs
from the film she appeared in as a pianist-singer, was her third full album
accompanied only by piano, this time played by Paul Smith. In 1964, she
performed a ravishing rendition of "Somewhere In The Night" with
pianist Tommy Flanagan live at the French Riviera which was later issued on the
1964 live album, Ella at Juan-Les-Pins. Fitzgerald's final major collaboration
with a piano player was Ella and Oscar, a 1975 duet with the revered Oscar
Peterson, who she had worked with on and off for more than two decades.
For the first time ever, all of Fitzgerald's captivating
collaborations with pianists on the labels Decca, Verve, and Pablo, have been
collected together as The Complete Piano Duets, which will be released March 13
as a 2CD and digital collection via Verve Records/UMe. The double album
includes detailed liner notes by noted author and music critic Will Friedwald.
The Complete Piano Duets sequences each track in the chronological
order it was recorded in, forming a miniature crash course on Fitzgerald's
various eras. You can drop in on her early sessions with Larkins ("Someone
To Watch Over Me," "But Not For Me," "I've Got a Crush On
You,") hear her and Paul Smith tackle Cole Porter ("Miss Otis
Regrets") and music from the gritty 1960 crime drama Let No Man Write My
Epitaph ("Black Coffee," "Angel Eyes," "I Cried For
You"), drop in on her and Tommy Flanagan at a 1964 French gig ("Somewhere
In The Night") and revisit inspired 1975 duets with Oscar Peterson from
the third act of her career ("Mean to Me," "How Long Has This
Been Going On?," "April In Paris").
As Friedwald writes in the liner notes, "Fitzgerald was
so great at everything–especially scatting and swinging–that it tended to
overshadow her ballad singing. Yet, as any one of the 43 tracks on this
collection makes clear, Ella Fitzgerald was a nonpareil singer of love songs, a
balladeer par excellence. Like her closest colleagues, Louis Armstrong, Frank
Sinatra, Nat King Cole, and Billie Holiday, Fitzgerald could get deep into not
just the words but the inner meaning of a song and bring out the profound
truths that the lyricist had in mind all along."
Sometimes, as on Ella Fitzgerald Sings The Cole Porter Song
Book and Ella Fitzgerald Sings The Duke Ellington Song Book, her sparer
recordings were sandwiched between big band and orchestral work. Now, for the
first time ever, all of Fitzgerald's exquisite piano duets have been assembled
on one program. Whether you're a fan of vocal jazz, solo piano or American
popular song in general, The Complete Piano Duets is a must-have document of a
masterful interpreter—raw, intimate, vulnerable, and oftentimes at her very
best.
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