Ella Swings Brightly With Nelson

Ella Swings Brighly With Nelson is one of half a dozen records on my shelves issued by the "World Record Club", a mail-order label set up in the UK in the mid-'50s. The records themselves (mostly) sound good, but the sleeve designs depart from the original ones in ways that don't improve them. The Verve issues of this album feature a photograph of Ms Fitzgerald & Mr Riddle, wheras here we have a rather muddily impressionistic drawing/painting of the singer.

By 1961, as Alun Morgan's sleevenotes state, both Ella and Nelson were widely renowned and much in demand. They had already worked together on The George and Ira Gershwin Song Book in '59. This record is one of a pair arising from sessions in '61 that were released the following year, the other being Ella Swings Gently With Nelson. It's an album that isn't perhaps either headliner's finest work, but it's still a very good one, and makes for enjoyable listening. The sorrowful lyrics of the opener 'When Your Lover Has Gone' are counteracted by the upbeat arrangement and Ella's vivacious delivery, which make it seem almost celebratory. One could argue it's not the aptest of versions, but it does sound wonderful.

Some other favourite tracks of mine are 'Love Me or Leave Me', 'The Gentleman is a Dope' and the closing 'Pick Yourself Up', an old chestnut burnished to a deep shine. There are a couple of songs that aren't as memorable ('Don't Be that Way', for example, which nevertheless is lifted by a powerful vocal performance), or that don't seem quite ideal choices for Fitzgerald. In the latter category, she works hard to state a convincing case for 'I Won't Dance', but - to my mind - does less well with Peggy Lee's 'I'm Gonna Go Fishin'' which suffers by comparison with Lee's own rendition.

Comments

All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4. An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...

Ein Schattenspiel, etc.

Georg Friedrich Haas is a contemporary Austrian composer of "art music". "Haas's style recalls that of György Ligeti in its use of micropolyphony, microintervals and the exploitation of the overtone series; he is often characterized as a leading exponent of spectral music" says wikipedia. Only a relative few of his many compositions have been issued on CD - many more of them can be found on YouTube. On this 2020 disc are three of his works in which standard classical instrumentation is augmented and altered by "live electronics". Two are string quartets and one is for solo piano. Is a string quartet still really a quartet if there are meanwhile some other people with laptops busily twizzling the sound? There is a live performance video of the 'String Quartet No. 7', the first work on the disc, where the JACK Quartet are supplemented by a trio of sound boffins to realise the composition. Whether it's properly a quartet or a septet is neithe...

This is a Recording

Search This Blog