Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook is a 1956 studio album by American jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald, accompanied by a studio orchestra conducted and arranged by Buddy Bregman, focusing on the songs of Cole Porter.
This was Fitzgerald's first album for the newly created Verve Records. Fitzgerald's time on the Verve label would see her produce her most highly acclaimed recordings, at the peak of her vocal powers. This album inaugurated Fitzgerald's Songbook series, each of the eight albums in the series focusing on a different composer of the canon known as the Great American Songbook. Fitzgerald's manager, (and the producer of many of her albums), Norman Granz, visited Cole Porter at the Waldolf-Astoria, and played him this entire album. Afterwards, Porter merely remarked, "My, what marvellous diction that girl has".
This album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2000, which is a special Grammy award established in 1973 to honor recordings that are at least twenty-five years old, and that have "qualitative or historical significance." In 2003, it was one of 50 recordings chosen by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry.
Read more about Ella Fitzgerald Sings The Cole Porter Songbook: Track Listing, Personnel
Famous quotes containing the words fitzgerald, sings, cole and/or porter:
“Young people do not perceive at once that the giver of wounds is the enemy and the quoted tattle merely the arrow.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“Drive the women from the bed just as you drove them from the choir; a eunuch sings in Rome, and the priests masturbate.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“You know, Frank, I’m beginning to get a new perspective on this crawling little animal known as man. Why a dog or a cat or a bird is cleverer than any human. They sense me immediately. But these shrewd detectives of yours—. Take away one of man’s senses and you render him helpless.”
—Lester Cole (1904–1985)
“Mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all.”
—Cole Porter (1893–1964)