Hello, Love on CD

Here we have the USA and European reissue of Fitzgerald’s 1960 album release Hello, Love. This is the first time that this album is brought out on CD, except for a 1990s Japanese issue, which was the only chance for us to get hold of the music. A few tracks, however, were issued as bonus tracks on the CD issue of Like Someone In Love.

The track list is familiar to all of us; Fitzgerald sings You Go To My Head, Willow Weep For Me, I’m Through With Love, Spring Will Be A Little Late This Year, Everything Happens To Me, Lost In A Fog, I’ve Grown Accustomed To His Face, I’ll Never Be The Same, So Rare, Tenderly, Stairway To The Stars, and Moonlight In Vermont.

<>These songs were recorded during multiple sessions. On July 24, 1957 and on October 28, 1957 Ella recorded songs with Frank DeVol, some issued on Like Someone In Love, and the album was completed on March 25, 1959.

During this 1959 recording set, Ella sang I’m Through With Love. Together with the July 1957 recorded Stairway To The Stars this song was issued on a 45rpm single. This record was advertised with the following advertisement of April 20, 1959 (from The Billboard). It says “Ella Fitzgerald – the hottest vocalist of them all sings the two hottest tunes… from the hottest motion picture ‘Some Like It Hot’.”

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This is not totally coincidental. Billy Wilder was making his film Some Like It Hot in 1958 and 1959, starring Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon as two musicians who have to escape for the mafia and disguise themselves as women to work in the orchestra of which Marilyn Monroe is the girl singer. And indeed, Monroe sings I’m Through With Love, but the other song on Ella’s single, Stairway To The Stars, is only used as instrumental background music in the picture.

While Billy Wilders film was very successful, Ella released this single with ‘songs from the picture’, which don’t have anything to do with the picture after all, in fact, these two songs are just songs which were still in stock for Ella. A commercial move.

<>So far the technical details. Now it’s time for the music – it’s Ella at the height of her career, with a top-notch orchestra led by Frank DeVol, issued in a time in which this music was not old-fashioned. During the sixties, in the public opinion this music became out-dated, as we can see when we look at the more temporary recordings of ‘Misty Blue’. It is quite surprising that the newer ‘Misty Blue’ album is seen as old-fashioned these days, while ‘Hello, Love’ is regarded as timeless…

Still, this album remains not too well-known. In my view that is because this album only confirms what fans already knew; that Ella was the best singer of popular music and jazz. This album is not really something new after the Songbooks, or after Like Someone In Love, which also mainly contained standards, so after all it doesn’t add anything to what people knew about Ella’s abilities.

<>To get to the point: this album is, even 45 years after it’s recording, still not really out of date. Ella sings in her best voice the most beautiful arranged songs, just ballads, and moves me every time I hear her sing I’m Through With Love and makes me swing very lightly when I listen to her singing Willow Weep For Me.

It is not spectacular like Ella’s live recordings, but it is stunning all the same.