Ella Fitzgerald - Sings the Rodgers and Hart Song Book (1957) VBR

Ella Fitzgerald - Sings the Rodgers and Hart Song Book VBR

Year 1957

Disc 1
1. Have You Met Miss Jones? 3:40
2. You Took Advantage Of Me 3:27
3. A Ship Without A Sail 4:07
4. To Keep My Love Alive 3:33
5. Dancing On The Ceiling 4:06
6. The Lady Is A Tramp 3:21
7. With A Song In My Heart 2:43
8. Manhattan 2:48
9. Johnny One Note 2:11
10. I Wish I Were In Love Again 2:36
11. Spring Is Here 3:37
12. It Never Entered My Mind 4:05
13. This Can't Be Love 2:54
14. Thou Swell 2:02
15. My Romance 3:42
16. Where Or When 2:46
17. Little Girl Blue 3:52


Disc 2
1. Give It Back To The Indians 3:10
2. Ten Cents A Dance 4:06
3. There's A Small Hotel 2:48
4. I Didn't Know What Time It Was 3:46
5. Ev'rything I've Got 3:21
6. I Could Write A Book 3:38
7. The Blue Room 2:29
8. My Funny Valentine 3:52
9. Bewitched, Bothered, And Bewildered 7:01
10. Mountain Greenery 2:14
11. Wait Till You See Her 1:30
12. Lover 3:16
13. Isn't It Romantic? 3:00
14. Here In My Arms 1:52
15. Blue Moon 3:11
16. My Heart Stood Still 3:03
17. I've Got Five Dollars 2:39
18. Lover (Mono Version) 3:15

Although neither the first nor the most fêted of Ella Fitzgerald's Songbooks, this collection drawn from the huge output of Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers is unquestionably the best. What sets the Rodgers and Hart Songbook apart from the other albums in the series that Ella recorded for Norman Granz's Verve label, quite simply, is the quality of the material that she had to work with. Her voice was such a magisterial instrument and her command of the expressive power of words so subtle that she seldom performed anything which drew on the full scope all her abilities. In the course of this double album, we get to see every facet of her talent. With Hart and Rodgers, Ella's enormous generosity of spirit, her love for song and for singing, her sheer humanity are put wholeheartedly at the disposal of very great music. Make no mistake, this is a desert island album. Richard Rodgers is most widely known for his nicely conceived but largely undemanding settings of the lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein - above all, perhaps, in 'Oklahoma' and 'The Sound of Music.' However, it has been recognised by many, especially jazz musicians, that Rodgers' earlier work with Lorenz Hart shows the full measure of his talents. When he worked with Hammerstein, the lyrics came first: the notoriously elusive Hart, on the other hand, preferred to write words for tunes that had already been composed. Before he was constrained by Hammerstein's trite little rhymes, Rodgers produced pieces that, among the great Broadway composers, are equalled in melodic suppleness and harmonic variety only by Jerome Kern. Hart, in return, wrote lyrics that are by turns scintillating in their wit and searing in their poignancy. Some of his experiments in rhyme are deliciously knowing: "Beans could get no keener re/ception in a beanery ... We could find no cleaner re/treat from life's machinery"; "The city's clamor can never spoil/ The dreams of a boy and 'goil'"; "When love congeals/ It soon reveals/ The faint aroma of performing seals,/ The double-crossing of a pair of heels"; and so on. Yet what ultimately makes Hart's lyrics so great is their apparent naturalness. There is a conversational ease about all his words, and he never needed to mangle sentences for the sake of scanning or rhyming. Song never seemed so unforced an extension of normal speech, and therefore never so touching.