Nineteen fifty-six was a defining year for American popular
music. The foundations of rock and roll were solidified when Elvis Presley,
newly signed to RCA Victor, released his eponymous first album. The
harder-edged rockabilly band Johnny Burnette and the Rock and Roll Trio did the
same. The year’s jazz releases were just as iconic: “Chet Baker Sings” helped
originate a smoother West Coast sound, and The Miles Davis Quintet would
ultimately find four full-length albums worth of hard bop material recorded
during only two day-long sessions. There was magic coming from every corner of
musical expression — Glenn Gould, Sonny Rollins, The Jazz Messengers, Fats
Domino — but one album, released in October of that year, was its own quiet
revolution.
The album cover is a picture of two middle-aged black
people, seated on folding chairs. The woman is in her late thirties, the man in
his mid-fifties. She wears a plain print housedress and a wry expression; the
man’s white socks are rolled at the ankles. A trumpet is on his lap, supporting
his folded arms. There is no written information on the cover other than the
name of the record label: “Verve,” it says. “A Panoramic True High Fidelity
Record.” On the spine is the album’s title: “Ella and Louis.”
The first of three successful collaborations between Ella
Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, “Ella and Louis” is nearly perfect. It is one
of those works of art — and they don’t come along often — that seems to have
always existed. It features two of the greatest artists the century produced:
Armstrong, the innovator and ambassador of jazz, and Fitzgerald, its most
gifted singer. The album was produced by a man almost solely responsible for
bringing jazz into the realm of respectability and desegregating its audience,
who founded the label which released it, and assembled the all-star team of
musicians who made it so marvelous. “Ella and Louis” helped rekindle interest
in what would become known as The Great American Songbook. Though it is
something only American culture could produce, “Ella and Louis” was also
something a large part of American society worked hard to prevent.
It started with Norman Granz, producer, promoter, and, by
1955, Ella Fitzgerald’s manager. “Any book on my life,” Granz told his
biographer Tad Hershorn, “would start with my basic philosophy of fighting
racial prejudice. I loved jazz, and jazz was my way of doing that.” Granz
leveraged Fitzgerald’s already vaunted reputation to secure more prestigious,
and higher paying, gigs. Once that was accomplished, he leveraged her
popularity to breakdown segregated venues: If you wanted Ella, you integrated
your audience.
Granz’ philosophy was simple: he considered many jazz greats
as world class artists, and believed they should be paid as such. Accordingly,
in 1944, he established Jazz at the Philharmonic in Los Angeles, bringing a
nightclub jam session to a concert venue. The show was a sellout, and the live
recording a best-seller. Subsequent JATP tours would include the biggest names
in jazz.
It was never easy. Once, at a JATP concert in Houston,
Texas, Granz caught a vice squad officer who Granz assumed was planting drugs
in Fitzgerald’s dressing room toilet. When confronted, the cop put his gun in
Granz’ stomach, saying, “I ought to shoot you.” Granz pushed hard against the
Houston police department, resulting in the case
being dropped.
Concurrent with taking over as Ella Fitzgerald’s manager,
Granz announced the formation of Verve Records. “I was interested in how I
could enhance Ella’s position, to make her a singer with more than just a cult
following amongst jazz fans,” he said. “So I proposed to Ella that the first
Verve album would not be a jazz project, but rather a songbook of the works of
Cole Porter. I envisaged her doing a lot of composers. The trick was to change
the backing enough so that, here and there, there would be signs of jazz.”
“When I recorded Ella,” Granz remembered, “I always put her
out front, not a blend. The reason was that I frankly didn’t care about what
happened to the music. It was there to support her. I’ve had conductors tell me
that in bar 23 the trumpet player hit a wrong note. Well, I don’t care. I
wasn’t making perfect records. If they came out perfectly, fine. But I wanted
to make records in which Ella sounded best.” The first
Verve album, “Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook,” sold 100,000
copies in the first month.
On August 15, 1956, the JATP performance at the Hollywood
Bowl became the best-attended event of the venue’s history even though, eleven
years before, they told Granz they would never host an event with the word
“jazz” in the title. The program featured Louis Armstrong and His All Stars,
Ella Fitzgerald, Art Tatum, and Oscar Peterson — an up-and-coming pianist Granz
brought to the States from his native Canada.
The next day, Fitzgerald and Armstrong met at the new
Capitol Studios in Hollywood for a recording session. “My idea was to record
the two of them as much as I could,” Granz said later, “because I had all kinds
of ideas for utilizing Louie with Ella.” The virtuoso backing band was the
Oscar Peterson Quartet, with Ray Brown on bass, Herb Ellis on guitar and Buddy
Rich on drums. The product, eleven songs recorded in just one day, would become
“Ella and Louis.”
Given all the musical firepower involved, it is an
understated set. Most of the songs are downtempo, anchored by bassist Ray
Brown’s impeccable timing and intonation. The vocals are mixed well up front,
as on any pop record. Granz produced, but Armstrong was given ultimate say over
songs and keys. The material is drawn mostly from show tunes and Fred Astaire
musicals from the Great Depression, written by such masters as George and Ira
Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Hoagy Carmichael. The track list is a catalog of
some of the strongest melodies ever conceived.
Fitzgerald is at the top of her form as a vocalist on “Ella
and Louis.” Her diction and pitch are perfect. She is the wind under a falling
autumn leaf on “Moonlight in Vermont,” despite the non-rhyming and occasionally
clunky lyric (for some reason, every verse is a haiku). She makes some
startling improvisational leaps — never at odds with the melody — but always
lands on her feet.
Armstrong is her idiosyncratic partner. His trumpet is as
declarative as ever. Though constant touring was starting to take a toll, his
occasional flubbed note feels more like enthusiasm. He never forgot his mentor
“Papa” Joe Oliver’s dictum: “get yourself a lead and you stick to it:” Most
of Armstrong’s trumpet solos on “Ella and Louis” are a recapitulation of the
song’s melody, though with the
delivery of a second line brass band. His harmonies, like his scat
singing around Ella’s vocals, are odd and endearing. According to Granz,
Armstrong “never deferred to the material. He did what he did, and that was the
thing I was trying to capture. You could hear his breathing or sighing or,
instead of the word, he’d come out with a sound. But to me that’s its quality.”
Thirty years before, recording with the Hot Five in Chicago,
Armstrong cut vocals by shouting into an acoustic recording horn. On “Ella and
Louis,” you can hear his wide vibrato dissolve into phlegmy breath, or his tone
suddenly drop down to a low baritone, as if the microphone was placed on his
very heart. It is an intimacy made more precious through imperfection.
Louis Armstrong’s road to cultural acceptance was long. In
1932, the year the “Ella and Louis” song “April in Paris” was composed,
Armstrong appeared in the short film “A Rhapsody in Black and
Blue” dressed in a leopard skin, as court musician for a bubble-filled
dreamscape called Jazzlandia. His playing is as incredible as the film’s racist
conceit. “Oh, chocolate drop, that’s me,” he sings:
‘Cause my hair is curly
Just because my teeth are pearly
Just because I always wear a smile
I like to dress up in the latest style
Just because I’m glad I’m livin’
Oh, I takes troubles all with a smile
Just because my color’s shade
Makes me different maybe
That’s why they call me Shine
The year before, 1931, Memphis police arrested Armstrong for
sitting next to a white woman on a bus, even though she was his manager’s wife.
In 1956, Armstrong publicly boycotted his hometown of New
Orleans, when it banned integrated bands. He wouldn’t return to perform there
until after the Civil Rights Act undid the law in 1964. In 1957, he and his
integrated audience were the target of a
bombing attempt in Knoxville, Tennessee.
By “Ella and Louis,” Armstrong was the internationally
recognized and beloved ambassador of jazz, who never lost his delight in the
job description. “You know, it never seemed like we were really recording,
because he always so happy,” Ella said
of him.
“He came in like it was nothing to it — just gonna have a
ball. And I would always mess up because I [was] so fascinated watching him
that sometimes I wouldn’t come in on time on my song because he would go
through the whole motion — “Sing it, Ella!” — and he’d be talking and cracking
and making jokes while he’s talking and you don’t know whether you should sing
or laugh, but that’s the kind of guy he was.”
Russ Garcia, who did the arrangements for the pairs’ third
album “Porgy and Bess,” remembered things a little differently. “Louis annoyed
her a little bit,” Garcia once said,
laughing. “When she was singing a beautiful passage, he’d come in with his
growling. She’d shoot him a sharp look and go on. It would throw her for a
second. But it came off beautifully. Some people call that album ‘Whipped Cream
and Sandpaper.'”
Some truly wonderful music was released in 1956. In
retrospect, it’s inevitable that talented white boys like Elvis Presley or
Johnny Burnette would want to explore black idioms — they could do so, after
all, with some grumbling but no censure. It makes sense that jazz pioneers like
Art Blakey and Miles Davis and John Coltrane would push the boundaries of the
form, but Louis Armstrong had been there first. It was his trumpet playing in
the 1920s with the Hot Five that fixed the idea in the public consciousness of
an improvisational lead instrument in a small band setting. All the rest,
although wondrous, was commentary.
It was perhaps more of a cultural leap, in the middle of
that tumultuous century, that two black performers could be considered the best
interpreters of white show tunes, and that the extemporaneous heart of jazz
could elevate the whole to iconic status, desegregating American popular
culture in just eleven songs.
***
Tom Maxwell is
a writer and musician. He likes how one informs the other.
__
De LONGREADS, 07/11/2016
No comments:
Post a Comment