New York Sun, November 13, 2006
In December 1959, Frank Sinatra, introducing a special guest on his ABC television program, made the following speech: "You know, a couple of weeks ago when somebody told me there was a record album coming out that was going to sell for a hundred dollars, I figured he was a real ding-a-ling! But when I learned that it was really five albums, I thought well, that's closer to reality. Twenty clams apiece -- that's not bad. And then when I found out it was recorded by Ella Fitzgerald, with Nelson Riddle's arrangements, and that it was an autographed set of all Gershwin songs, well I ran right out and grabbed me a few!"
Sinatra, who almost never plugged one of his own recordings, was so jazzed by the idea of Ella Fitzgerald and Nelson Riddle doing a deluxe package of George and Ira Gershwin songs that he devoted more than 10 minutes of his prime-time special to promoting this new Fitzgerald album. Part of this was in deference to the magic of the name of George Gershwin, the most universally admired of all American composers.
That same magic has led Jazz at Lincoln Center to present two separate concerts, "Manhattan Rhapsody: A Celebration of George Gershwin" (tonight), and "Gershwin" (Thursday through Saturday), both of which star Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Orchestra as well as the American Composer's Orchestra, but with an entirely different array of guest stars. Tonight's concert is the annual JALC gala and, as such, presents a panoply of star singers: Patti Austin, Kitty Carlisle Hart, Angela Lansbury, Brian Stokes Mitchell, and spotlights the singer-pianist- scholar Michael Feinstein, one of the world's authorities on all matters Gershwin. The weekend program features the two orchestras, as well as pianist Marcus Roberts in a largely instrumental program with special emphasis on the orchestrations of Riddle, which were written for that 1959 album that Sinatra regarded so highly.
According to Mr. Feinstein, who worked for many years as Ira Gershwin's personal assistant, the 1959 "Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Songbook" was Ira's personal favorite album. It is almost inarguably the greatest collection of Gershwin music, not to mention a highlight of Fitzgerald's career.
In 1959, when the producer Norman Granz began planning what would be the fifth in the Fitzgerald songbook series, he knew it had to be something spectacular. Granz had to top the Gershwin songbook packages that had already been released by such big-selling competitors as Sarah Vaughan and Chris Connor. More important, he had to outdo Fitzgerald's previous Gershwin project from 1950, "Ella Sings Gershwin," which was a model of intimacy and economy on which Fitzgerald sang eight classic Gershwin songs accompanied only by the matchless pianist Ellis Larkins.
Granz, who had made a career out of helming large and lavish productions, knew it would be unwise to overdo it, so he brought in a musical director who could make the new project into an intimate spectacular.
Nelson Riddle was, on the strength of his orchestrations for Sinatra and Nat King Cole, recognized by 1959 as the classiest arranger in the business. Together, he and Granz both expanded and narrowed the focus of the new Gershwin songbook, making the project a five-album set, the biggest entry in the songbook series. But they excluded from it the songs that George Gershwin had written in the earliest part of his career, before he began collaborating with his lyricist brother Ira.
For his part, Ira Gershwin was delighted, not only that Granz gave him much-deserved title status with his late brother (who had died abruptly at 38 of a brain tumor in 1937), but that the producer sought his approval. After every night of recording, over the course of 10 sessions between January and July 1959, Granz stopped at Gershwin's house to play him an acetate of the day's work.
Sinatra's championing of the set is especially interesting because he did far fewer Gershwin songs than one might have expected. The brothers rarely wrote what Sinatra would have called "saloon songs" in the style of Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, or Lorenz Hart. "They Can't Take That Away From Me" was one of their most touching texts, but the song might never have broken anybody's heart had it been recorded by Sinatra. Gershwin himself later expressed surprise that his "I've Got a Crush On You," originally conceived as a peppy foxtrot, was slowed down by singers and musicians into a largo love song.
Sinatra specialized in the extremes of "sadness and elation," as he put it, whereas Fitzgerald was happiest in the middle, which is where most Gershwin songs are emotionally. Throughout the recording of the Gershwin Songboom, both Fitzgerald and Riddle underscored this sense of middle-ness by making the Gershwins' happy songs a little bit less happy and the sad songs significantly more upbeat. The most somber tune in the whole works is "Oh, Lady Be Good," which Fitzgerald had long treated as a swinger, but here repurposed, as the song's verse states, as "a tale of woe / terribly sad but true." "How Long Has This Been Going On," originally an upbeat air of romantic discovery, became a melancholy contemplation of the possibilities of love, the questioning nature of the lyric intensified by Fitzgerald's interplay with the trombonist Milt Bernhart.
Neither Riddle nor Fitzgerald ever distorted any of the original meanings of the 59 songs, but that doesn't mean they weren't playful: The 1924 "Half of It Dearie Blues" opens with Fitzgerald scatting a more authentic blues line and Riddle's orchestration includes some minor growling from trumpeter Pete Candoli and a very modern modulation. "He Loves And She Loves" opens with a sustained string line over a bass vamp that sounds downright modal, while "Just Another Rhumba" (which is hardly that) is decked out in polyrhythmic and polytonal splendor.
"Ira loved that album," Mr. Feinstein said. So does everyone else: The set was an immediate hit, especially for a five-album mega-box. Fitzgerald and Riddle reinvented Gershwin for the age of the LP and it's safe to say that more people in the modern era know the great Gershwin songs from this album than from any other source. In fact, it's likely where Mr. Marsalis and the members of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra were first introduced to the Gershwins.
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