Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Song Book is a total surprise. I read that she was a scat singer and I hate scat singing. I did not know of her music at all. The only thing I knew about the Gershwin Brothers was that Donna Summer sang that she wanted “to have dinner with Gershwin.”
In some ways I could write the same things I had written about Sarah Vaughan. I thought they were both white, even more so Fitzgerald reminded of Doris Day. They both seem like vanilla ice cream after listening to Billie Holiday. But for some reason I like this overly long album that does not have scat.
Ira Gershwin said, “I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them”
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Song Book is almost three and a half hours. If she was on X Factor or American Idol Simon Cowell would call this project self-indulgent. It really is too long. It seems as if she did this type of album for a few of the great American songwriters. In today’s short attention span generation this would not work. Some singers today are rethinking the album and prefer to release a song or two. As a consumer, I still prefer to buy the whole album, whole cd or whole digital format of an artist’s work.
Overall, I love this album and I cannot point to a real reason why. There is something in the songs themselves that I like and the way she sings them makes them soar. I will definitely try some other music by Ella Fitzgerald as long as it is not scat. For now, I will listen to this album, but as if it is three different albums because my attention span is… 7/10.
