Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Burt Bacharach Songbook

An ELLA FITZGERALD Birthday Month Special : Pop! Goes the Ella, Part 2

Pop! Goes The Ella - Ella Fitzgerald Sings The Great Hits of Today
(SSS #144 2025-03-19)
download: <or> play online:

First, here is a note from KSDS listener Ms. Gloria Warren, who just heard my latest Sing! Sing! Sing! Program for KSDS San Diego - which is titled “Pop! Goes The Ella” and features a lot of the tracks I’m talking about here on Substack. She writes to me with the following words of encouragement:

Ella gives a whole new sound to Bacharach. His songs never sounded so good. I have a brand new appreciation for his music. Ella has turned those songs into something else! She’s absolutely great! Thanks so much!!

Thank you, Ms. Warren!

(And also thank you to ROB ISAIAH for this glorious new cover below. (Note: the color photo of Ella is from her appearance on the Perry Como Kraft Music Hall of April 25, 1966 - her 49th birthday!)

(All songs here:
Music by Burt Bacharach |
Lyrics by Hal David)

“WIVES AND LOVERS”

Someday I’ll have to do a whole program of “movie exploitation songs,” which are songs commissioned by a producer or a film studio to promote a given release, but are not actually heard anywhere in the film itself. The tradition of such exploitation ran from the silent movie era at least through the 1970s. Some wags may note that the term “exploitation song” may have a double meaning in this case, since the lyrics have depicted what many over the last 50 years or so have considered to be an inherently exploitative relationship between women and men.

Needless to say, no one was embarrassed by the words in 1963 when Burt Bacharach and Hal David wrote the song at the behest of Paramount Pictures to promote the Janet Leigh - Van Johnson marital comedy Wives and Lovers. In fact, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences was so not embarrassed by the song that they gave a Grammy - as far as I can tell, Bacharach’s first - to the hit Jack Jones performance as the male vocal of the year.

Fitzgerald recorded it three years later on an under-appreciated release, Whisper Not, her final studio album for Verve and her second collaboration with the brilliant Marty Paich, better known for his work with Mel Tormé and Sammy Davis, Jr. The more famous version of “W & L” - by Frank Sinatra, Count Basie, and Quincy Jones - is in 4/4, because, as Jones told Bacharach, “The Basie band doesn’t play waltzes.” (He might have added that Sinatra also strove to avoid ¾ time as well whenever he could.) Ella, however, like Jack Jones in his hit version, embraces the swinging ¾ time signature, which I think helps the song - ¾ to me always suggests a couple dancing, and to me, that’s what this song is about. (Incidentally, speaking of the “embarrassing” lyrics, Jack Jones himself composed a response lyric, from the female point of view, which I’ll share in a future Substack.)

Fitzgerald also sang “W & L” in a number of concerts in 1966, so I’m linking to this excellent live version, itself issued on Pablo, in a video from the famous Stockholm Concert, with the Jimmy Jones Trio and the entire Duke Ellington Orchestra. (And, as a bonus track, she follows the wives and the lovers with a particularly feisty sweetheart, Miss “Sweet Georgia Brown” herself.)
That Stockholm performance is viewable only on YouTube itself, so click here.

“ALFIE”
Detour: “You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You”

“Sexy lights, dear,” Ella says at the top. The 1966 British “dramedy” Alfie was a triumph not only for Burt Bacharach and Hal David, who wrote the title song, but also for jazz itself since the background underscoring - everything but the title song - was by the great Sonny Rollins. The title song itself was only heard over the ending credits, as sung by Cher, in a prominent non-Sonny performance.

As far as I can tell, this is the only performance of “Alfie” by Ella that survives - there’s no studio version, alas - and it’s a highlight of the sensational new release The Moment of Truth: Ella at the Coliseum, a newly-discovered live performance from that famed venue in Oakland, CA, in June 1967.

This is the track that makes the argument that there should have been an album titled Ella Fitzgerald sings the Burt Bacharach & Hal David Songbook. It also “puts paid,” to use a British expression, to the idea that Fitzgerald wasn’t a great ballad singer or that she didn’t care about the words. This song brought out the best in virtually everyone who sang it, from Cher to Jack Jones to Tony Bennett to both Warwick sisters, Dionne and Dee Dee, but I find Ella’s version to be perhaps the most poignant and moving of them all. We also love Ella’s detour through “You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You.” As one wag in the house shouts out near the end of the song, “if you love this, clap!”

“I’LL NEVER FALL IN LOVE AGAIN”

The classic Act 2 number from the equally classic musical Promises, Promises, by the four-man team of Burt, Hal, Neil, and Simon. This was the great hit from the show, but it’s a lesser performance by Ella. The studio version is from a 1969 album recorded in London but generally credited to arranger-conductor Gerald Wilson that has been issued under several titles but is most frequently released as Things Ain’t What They Used to Be. All the Ella performances, including several live concert versions, regretfully, make the mistake of being too faithful to the pop records - including a deliberately non-swinging piano part that runs throughout and sounds more like a harpsichord. To have Tommy Flanagan playing this part seems like a waste of Tommy Flanagan. Fitzgerald and Flanagan - my two favorite Irish jazz artists - should have done what Ella did with most of the other Bacharach songs, in bringing them over to her idiom, rather than her going over to Burt and Hal’s. Still, this appears to be the only Bacharach song that inspired Ella to do a brief scat interlude. Above, the British studio version and a live performance from Bussola, Italy, 1971.

“CLOSE TO YOU”
Detour: “We’ve Only Just Begun”

Fitzgerald sang this Carpenters hit several times in concert, this 1971 set from the newly-reactivated Nice Jazz Festival being the most widely heard. It repeats the central error of “Never Fall in Love Again” in that it should have been more Ella & Tommy and less Burt & Hal. But still, Karen Carpenter, a lifelong Ella fanatic, must have been delighted, especially when Fitzgerald detoured into another Carpenters hit, “We’ve Only Just Begun,” in the coda. Incidentally, Ms. Carpenter realized one of the pivotal dreams of her sadly short life when Fitzgerald made a guest appearance on a 1980 Carpenters TV special, in which the two sing together.

“RAINDROPS KEEP FALLING ON MY HEAD”
Detour: “Oh Happy Day”

Oh happy day! This is a highlight from the 1970 Budapest concert released by Pablo several years after the singer’s death in 1996. Ella and Tommy exert themselves a little more here, slowing it down into a bittersweet, melancholy contemplation of the vagaries of worrying about the weather. To me, this is closer to classic Ella, especially with the detour through “Oh Happy Day,” the 1967 pop-gospel hit by the Edwin Hawkins Singers, at the coda.

“THIS GIRL’S IN LOVE WITH YOU”
Detours:
“I’m Going to Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter”
“What the World Needs Now”

The final two Bacharach & David songs sung by Ella Fitzgerald, “This Girl’s In Love With You” and “A House Is Not a Home,” were both recorded officially by Ella on her 1969 album, Sunshine of Your Love, as well as live at the 1969 Montreux Jazz Festival. Sunshine of Your Love was an unusual project, a sort of hybrid of a studio album and a live album, in that it was recorded live at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco in 1968, but it was a whole new program of Ella doing mostly new, contemporary pop songs, accompanied by a full studio-style orchestra, as well as her touring trio of Flanagan, bassist Frank De La Rosa, and drummer Ed Thigpen (known for his associations with Oscar Peterson and being name-checked by Stan Freberg). No arranger is credited, although some of the LP issues state, “orchestra conducted by Tommy Flanagan.” Furthermore, Ella reprised both of these in concert at Montreux the following June, and those two versions are even better.

“This Girl’s In Love With You”: to say it simply, I think that Ella’s - sad but affirmative - is the all-time best reading (sorry, Herb Alpert, and sorry, everyone else) of this classic Burt / Hal song. She also sang it on the June 14, 1969 Kraft Music Hall, taped in London and hosted by Tony Sandler and Ralph Young.

“A HOUSE IS NOT A HOME”
Detour: “It’s So Nice to Have a Man Around the House”

This is what I call irony: for years, songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen was an A#1 star client of the legendary New York madame Polly Adler (as were Desi Arnaz and most of the straight guys in East Coast show business) and Van Heusen was also probably the number one composer of movie main title songs in Hollywood history. Yet when they finally make a movie about Polly Adler, instead of assigning the title song to Van Heusen, they hand it over to those two young upstarts, Bacharach and David.

The 1964 film A House Is Not A Home is based on Adler’s 1953 memoir of the same title. As Dominic Serene notes in his admirable study of the composer, Burt Bacharach: Song by Song, “Another year, another Shelley Winters B movie with a superlative Bacharach-David theme. Paramount, having learned its lesson with Wives and Lovers, included Brook Benton’s recording of ‘A House Is Not a Home’ in its namesake film.”

The movie, the memoir, and even Polly Adler herself have all been forgotten for decades, but “A House Is Not a Home” lives on as one of Bacharach and David’s most haunting ballads, perhaps the most powerful torch song they ever wrote. And don’t fail to note Hal David’s homage to Ira Gershwin in the line, “It’s all a crazy game,” borrowed from “The Man That Got Away.”

Ella’s two major versions of “House,” Sunshine of Your Love (San Francisco, 1968) and Montreux 1969 are both excellent, but to me, the live at Montreux version has the edge. This is one of Ella’s all-time most powerful slow love songs; there’s no mistaking the feeling she crams into every note and every syllable; you can tell that this is a woman who has loved and suffered. A truly powerful performance. Here’s proof positive that Ella could break your heart into a million little pieces whenever she wanted.

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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 sings Mondo Broadway (including Chicago & The Wiz)
Ella Sings the Beatles
Ella Sings the Burt Bacharach Songbook

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

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Coming on Wednesday April 30 @ 7:00PM, THE NEW YORK ADVENTURE CLUB presents TIN PAN ALLEY: THE BIRTHPLACE OF AMERICA’S MUSIC INDUSTRY (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.”
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