Ella Fitzgerald Sings "Post-Nuclear Show Tunes"

An ELLA FITZGERALD Birthday Month Special : Pop! Goes the Ella, Part 4

Pop! Goes The Ella - Ella Fitzgerald Sings The Great Hits of Today
(SSS #144 2025-03-19)
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It’s not a coincidence that modern jazz was born at roughly the same time as the modern musical theater, and that they both first saw the light of day around the same time as the introduction of nuclear energy and weapons; there were Oppenheimer equivalents in all of these fields of endeavor.

Ella Fitzgerald had a fascinating relationship with Broadway: she had come up during a curious age in which white popular singers, especially Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, frequently were assigned to record new show tunes - including virtually all the major new Rodgers & Hammerstein and Lerner & Loewe productions - but Black artists, not so much. If we can agree that the three leading African American vocal artists of the 1940s were Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and Nat King Cole (the King Cole Trio), they recorded virtually no new Broadway songs in all of the 1940s.

Most of the show tunes that Ella recorded were part of her Songbook series, by which time these songs were already becoming standards; virtually no one, for instance, remembered or cared which show which a George and Ira Gershwin song came from, unless it was Porgy and Bess. Norman Granz was her major mentor in this area, and as much as he loved this music, he had little taste for Broadway itself - only the music. Ella recorded a pair of South Pacific songs when the show was new in 1949, under the aegis of Milt Gabler, but that was virtually all.

Looking at Ella’s concerts of the 1960s and onwards, there are a number of newish Broadway show tunes that turn up in her concerts of the era. Like virtually all her fellow popular singers of the period - Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Steve & Eydie, Mel Tormé, Peggy Lee, Sarah Vaughan, Billy Eckstine - she did a Broadway album, Ella Sings Broadway, recorded in 1962. (And including a third South Pacific number.) This installment of our Pop! Goes The Ella series will offer a few, occasionally surprising examples of the First Lady of Jazz - or, as Mel Tormé called her, “The High Priestess of Song,” singing numbers from then-relatively recent Broadway shows.

“People”
(Music: Jule Styne | Lyrics: Bob Merrill | from Funny Girl, 1964)

“Hello, Dolly!”
(Music & Lyrics by Jerry Herman | from Hello, Dolly! 1964)

“The Sweetest Sounds”
(Music & Lyrics by Richard Rodgers; No Strings, 1962)

Fitzgerald included no less than three roughly contemporary Broadway shows in her 1964 album, Hello, Dolly! In addition to the title track, there was “People” from Funny Girl, and “The Sweetest Sounds” from No Strings. “Hello, Dolly!” is a solidly swinging big band chart, rather different from Louis Armstrong’s hit, Dixieland-styled version; she would also sing it with her trio at Juan Les Pins at the Antibes Jazz Festival in July of 1964 and bring in back in 1971, presumably in the wake of the Dolly movie. “People” is very sweetly sung, with more authentic feeling than many better-known performances of the Funny Girl anthem, though I’m also partial to the interpretations of both Nat King Cole (in 1964) and, later, Tony Bennett. She would keep coming back to “People” over the years, but, alas, this is the only time we know of that she sang “Sweetest Sounds” - it doesn’t seem to have carried over into her concert sets at all. All three are first-rate arrangements by Johnnie Spence, who conducted a BBC-TV concert with her in 1965 - “Sweetest Sounds” uses the Riddle-inspired device of bongos and Latin percussion in a non-Latin context. All three are excellent examples of Fitzgerald singing with real emotional impact, which generally happened more in live settings than in the studio.

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“Matchmaker, Matchmaker”
(Lyrics: Sheldon Harnick | Music: Jerry Bock | from Fiddler on the Roof)

To me this is the Ella Fitzgerald masterpiece that nobody knows - an absolutely perfect rendition by her - from the other mega-blockbuster-hit Broadway musical of 1964, Fiddler on the Roof. Where Armstrong, Bennett, and Crosby all leaned into “Sunrise, Sunset,” this is Ella’s preferred song from Fiddler and she does a wonderful job with it. From her final studio album for Verve, Whisper Not (1966), it’s a wonderfully swinging ¾ arrangement by Marty Paich - not 6/8 or 6/4 or anything flakey like that. Alas, she only sang the song once that I know of. (The discography lists an un-issued studio version from June 1965, in which she also sang an un-issued and unfinished version of “Don’t Rain on My Parade” from Funny Girl, that she never came back to.) Ella never sang this live, but she did include it as a quote on at least two performances of her epic scat solo on “How High the Moon”; above you’ll find brief clips from two French concerts, Montreux 1975 and live at the Château de l'Empéri 1978.

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“You’d Better Love Me”
(Music & Lyrics by Hugh Martin & Timothy Gray | from High Spirits, 1964)

Still another song from a 1964 musical, this had been very convincingly rendered for the pop and jazz world by Jack Jones and Mel Tormé, to name only two. For whatever reason, Fitzgerald didn’t start including it in her set until five years later, in the fall of 1969. She more or less introduced it in an excellent big band chart (arranger unknown) on The Ed Sullivan Show of November 23, 1969, and we have at least two live concert versions with the Tommy Flanagan Trio, Italy 1970 and the officially-issued Budapest show of May 20th. This is another great Ella swinger - all of these tunes could have and should have gone into a new set that might have been called Ella Swings Shubert Alley or some such.

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“Cabaret”
(Lyrics by Fred Ebb | Music by John Kander | from Cabaret, 1966)

This song rather mysteriously turns up in two known Ella concerts from 1969-1970, and while she sings it with considerable aggression, I don’t think she truly makes it her own in the same way that she does “Matchmaker, Matchmaker” and some of the other songs here. The above is from the Antibes Jazz Festival, Juan-Les Pins, July 28 or 29, 1969, although the 1970 Budapest version is a considerable improvement - by this point, she has it considerably more under control.

“Roxie”
backed with “My Own Best Friend”
(Lyrics by Fred Ebb | Music by John Kander | from Chicago, 1975)

I never realized that this single - apparently the only one she ever issued on the Pablo label - existed until the resourceful Rob Lester brought it to my attention. Apart from “Cabaret” this is the only other time she tackled anything by this hugely-successful and great Broadway duo; Sinatra would have probably loved it if she had followed his lead in singing “New York, New York.” “Roxie” is a different kind of swinger, set in a jazz age two-beat, with a ragtime-y tack piano but, surprisingly, an electric bass booming throughout - it has a kind of Peter Allen “Everything Old Is New Again” vibe, like ‘70s nostalgia. “My Own Best Friend” is an excellent ballad, again with more ties to the philosophy and worldview of the 1970s, rather than the ‘20s, in which the musical Chicago is set.

“He's the Wiz”
”Ease on Down the Road”
(Music & Lyrics by Charlie Smalls | from The Wiz, 1975)

To quote Youtube.com: “​​From a 1978 concert a treasure The Wiz in this year she works for the last time with Tommy Flanagan enjoy it and leave a reaction for more.”

“Thejazzsingers channel” posted this in 2010 and I have been both watching it over and over and scratching my head over it for lo these 15 years. The poster gives a date and place of “Europe 1978” but doesn’t get more specific than that - I have literally combed through dozens of Fitzgerald European concerts but I have never been able to figure out exactly when and where it came from. Also, he tells us this is Ella’s final show with Flanagan, which is believable but again, I’d like to know more. As a bonus, in between the two big songs from The Wiz, "He's the Wiz" in which Flanagan and the trio sing behind her - Ella addresses them as “glee club” - and "Ease on Down the Road,” she goes into an extended detour through the massive 1975 disco era hit, “The Hustle” by Van McCoy. Anyhow, this is a wonderful performance that reveals Ella’s determination to keep current with the latest hits, on Broadway and elsewhere, as indeed a worthwhile pursuit. I would love to see and hear the rest of this concert - and I would also love to hear it without the distortion on the soundtrack here. (Judith Tick mentions Ella doing “Ease on Down” in a show in Washington, D.C. in 1976, but I don’t think it’s the same performance as the above.)

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PS: Highly Recommended: The best-ever Ella Fitzgerald Discography, as compiled by the late Michele Scasso with considerable help and input from the mighty Steve Albin. Accessible here!

Coming soon:

Ella at the Movies

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(Very special thanks to Elizabeth Zimmer & Dan Fortune for their expert proofing, hey!)

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Coming on Wednesday May 21 @ 7:00PM, THE NEW YORK ADVENTURE CLUB presents THE RAT PACK: A LEGENDARY ENSEMBLE (All presentations are available for replay viewing for one week after the live event. For more information & reservations, please click here.)

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Sing! Sing! Sing! : My tagline is, “Celebrating the great jazz - and jazz-adjacent - singers, as well as the composers, lyricists, arrangers, soloists, and sidemen, who help to make them great.”
A production of KSDS heard Saturdays at 10:00 AM Pacific; 1:00 PM Eastern.
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Pop! Goes The Ella - Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Great Hits of Today
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The NAT KING COLE birthday Special - Nat & Nelson swing the Standards
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Ella Fitzgerald: "Ella's Race Problem" with Judith Tick
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THE REAL AMBASSADORS with special guest Ricky Riccardi
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SLOUCHING TOWARDS BIRDLAND is a Substack newsletter by Will Friedwald. The best way to support my work is with a paid subscription, for which I am asking either $5 a month or $50 per year. Thank you for considering. (Thanks as always to Beth Naji & Arlen Schumer for special graphics.) Word up, peace out, go forth and sin no more! (And always remember: “A man is born, but he’s no good no how, without a song.”)

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