Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Song Book (Expanded Edition)

When Ella Fitzgerald decided to dive into the Great American Songbook in the mid-'50s, her career was at a crossroads. She’d been working as a singer for 20 years—jazz, mostly, with some novelty stuff early on, gliding through the transition from big band and swing into bop—but the ceiling suddenly seemed closer than it had before. “I had gotten to the point where I was only singing bebop,” she told the New York Times in 1974. “I thought bebop was ‘it,’ and that all I had to do was go someplace and sing bop. But it finally got to the point where I had no place to sing.”
Spurred on by the suggestion of her manager and producer Norman Granz, Fitzgerald moved forward by looking back, embarking on a multi-album exploration of individual songwriters (including Cole Porter and Duke Ellington) that shifted Fitzgerald’s star into an entirely new orbit, bringing the flair of jazz to a mainstream—and predominantly white—audience for whom black music was not yet on the cultural menu. By the time she got around to the Gershwins in 1959, the formula was proven. Working with the arranger Nelson Riddle (famous in part for his collaborations with Frank Sinatra), Fitzgerald expanded her ambition, recording more than 50 songs that crisscrossed pop, show tunes, orchestral music, and jazz.
As with past entrants in the series, the material—“But Not for Me,” “The Man I Love,” “Nice Work If You Can Get It”—was old but the approach was fresh, finding new stylistic wrinkles in familiar, comforting forms. (Or, as Granz put it later, “The trick was to change the backing enough so that, here and there, there would be signs of jazz.”) And though Riddle’s arrangements give the ear plenty to luxuriate in (the quietly pulsing horns on “They All Laughed,” the twinkling celeste on “But Not for Me,” the rumba percussion of “He Loves and She Loves”), they never overwhelm Fitzgerald’s voice, which carries the music with the effortless mastery of someone who didn't just know the notes but lived the words.
The album had a seismic effect on Fitzgerald's career and spawned a long, fruitful collaboration between her and Riddle, including songbook entries dedicated to Jerome Kern and Johnny Mercer, an early-’70s tribute to Cole Porter (Ella Loves Cole), and a 1982 album—The Best Is Yet to Come. As for the Gershwins, it was Ira who quipped, “I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them.”