Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Songbook is a 1959 (see 1959 in music) five album set by the American jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald, focusing on the songs of George and Ira Gershwin. It was recorded with the Nelson Riddle Orchestra, marking the first time that Ella and Riddle had worked together. This album is the largest single recording project that Ella worked on, and it is considered to be one of the most ambitious achievements in Western popular music.
The album cover is an original portrait of Fitzgerald by the French artist Bernard Buffet, starting a tradition of using contemporary artists for Fitzgerald 's albums, the artwork of Henri Matisse gracing the cover of her Harold Arlen Songbook (1961).
Riddle arranged 59 Gershwin compositions for the album, including the two orchestral suites which open the album. Though Fitzgerald was 20 years old at the time George Gershwin died in 1937, Ira Gershwin was still alive to see this project completed, and helped contribute lyrics and support to some songs on the album which had never been recorded before. It was this project that led Ira Gershwin to say that he had "never known how good our songs were until I heard Ella sing them".
Ella Fitzgerald was 41 when she recorded this album, and at the peak of her vocal powers, demonstrated in the earlier Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Song Book, and her two greatest live albums from this period, Ella in Berlin (1960) and Ella in Rome (1958). Like the other songbooks devoted to the Broadway composers, Fitzgerald gets only a single outlet for her notable scat singing, on "I Got Rhythm".
Fitzgerald's recording of "But Not for Me" won her the 1960 Grammy Award for Best Vocal Performance, Female.
It is listed as one of the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.
Read more about Ella Fitzgerald Sings The George And Ira Gershwin Songbook: Track Listing, Personnel
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“Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go according to any rules. They’re not like aches or wounds; they’re more like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“Like vinegar on a wound is one who sings songs to a heavy heart. Like a moth in clothing or a worm in wood, sorrow gnaws at the human heart.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Proverbs 25:20.
“I can’t get started with you.”
—Ira Gershwin (1896–1983)