Our Lindy 3 and 4 teachers Peter and Julia present us every Monday with an Album of the Week, always including some amazing historical context and fun trivia. This made us really enthusiastic about learning more about the culture and the music. So we thought we’d share the love by putting all of them on our website.
This is the Album of the week for the 22nd of January. Ella Fitzgerald’s The Complete Ella in Berlin: Mack the Knife (Live).
Listen to the album on Spotify
Listen to the album on Youtube
Peter:
“Befitting our stay this weekend, we are sharing this album – a recording of Ella Fitzgerald in Berlin from 1960. Her version of Mack the Knife became very famous – next to being the first famous female vocalist singing this song, she forgets the lyrics partway and starts to improvise. It won her a Grammy. We also love how she keeps saying thank you to the audience before ensuing in some giggles.
One famous anecdote from her early life is when she wanted to join an open stage show in Harlem as a dancing act, but was so intimidated by another dancing duo that instead she entered as a singer – and won. Soon after, drummer Chick Webb took her into his band, which she continued leading for a while after he passed away. One of her biggest hits from that time is ‘A tisket, a tasket’.
She became very well known as solo artist with her recording of many American classics from a collection called the great american Song Book.
She is particularly well known for her scat style singing, where she solos along the instruments – awesome examples of this are her version of flying home and airmail special from the 1957 Newport Jazz festival album. In live albums, there’s usually a lot to discover in her interaction with the crowd and her fellow musicians – she references other songs (also airmail special on the Newport album) or imitates other musicians (E.g. her 1962 version of Bill Bailey that you probably know from dance classes) and you can just generally feel that she loves what she’s doing.
Throughout her career, she worked with many other famous artists, such as Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and particularly nice and cheesy duets with Louis Armstrong (e.g. cheek to cheek on the album Ella and Louis)
Bonus: one of my recent favorites is the musical journey she takes us on during her performance of ‘it don’t mean a thing’ in London’s famous jazz club Ronnie Scott’s in 1974. She sings and has her musicians play in the style of classical music, Dixieland, Country and Western, Count Basie (‘they swing you into baaad health!’), Duke Ellington (‘the encyclopedia of music’), and Soul (‘the young people, they don’t like to dance together’), before segueing ridiculously smoothly to the actual song.”
Thank you very much for sharing this with us Peter!
