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
Famous quotes containing the words fitzgerald, sings and/or gershwin:
“Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat ... the redeeming things are not “happiness and pleasure” but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“When icicles hang by the wall,
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail;
When blood is nipped, and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl:
Tu-whit, tu-whoo!—
A merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“De t’ings dat yo’ li’ble
To read in de Bible—
It ain’t necessarily so.”
—Ira Gershwin (1896–1983)