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WITH all the multi-disc jazz boxes that have come out in recent years — the complete Miles Davis on Columbia, the complete Charlie Parker on Savoy, the complete Duke Ellington on RCA and so on — it’s hard to believe that any significant tapes by
any major musician might still be languishing undiscovered in a record
company’s archives.
Yet Verve has just released “Twelve Nights in Hollywood,” a four-CD boxed set of Ella Fitzgerald singing 76 songs at the Crescendo, a small jazz club in Los Angeles, in
1961 and ’62 — and none of it has ever been released until now.
These
aren’t bootlegs; the CDs were mastered from the original tapes, which
were produced by Norman Granz, Verve’s founder and Fitzgerald’s
longtime manager.
They capture the singer in her peak years, and
at top form: more relaxed, swinging and adventurous, across a wider
span of rhythms and moods, than on the dozens of other albums that hit
the bins in her lifetime.
Richard Seidel, the producer of the
boxed set, first heard the tapes early this year. He was driving to
Massachusetts from his home in New Jersey and brought along some rough
CD transfers to play in the car.
“I was feeling kind of down that
day,” he recalled, “and the more I listened, I could not help but start
to smile. I’ve worked on dozens of Ella projects over the years, but
there was something different about this one — the sheer rhythmic joy
she projects, the endlessly inventive improvising.”
There’s
nothing rare about a joyous Ella Fitzgerald recording; the woman exuded
joy in nearly every note she sang. Yet the level on these sessions
soared higher and plumbed deeper.
Gary Giddins, the veteran
critic and author of “Jazz,” agrees. “This ranks on the top shelf of
her live recordings,” he said. “It’s about as good as it gets.”
Why
these tapes stayed locked in the vault for nearly half a century — and
what it took to set them free — is a tale of a producer’s neglect, a
jazz sleuth’s obsession and a string of happy coincidences.
The
1961 Crescendo gig, which took place from May 11 to 21 (with one night
off), was booked as an afterthought to begin with, a time filler
between a European tour that Fitzgerald and her quartet had begun in
February and a monthlong stay at the Basin Street East in New York that
June.
Granz took the unusual step of taping every set. But in the
next year alone he and Fitzgerald recorded six studio albums, most of
them with large orchestras, including two of her eight heavily promoted
songbook albums, each devoted to standards by a prominent American
composer.
In this context it’s not so surprising that the
Crescendo tapes received short shrift. “My guess,” Mr. Seidel said in a
phone interview, “would be that Norman Granz was just recording Ella so
much at the time, and was probably focused much more on her big studio
projects.”
Granz did pull 12 tracks from the roughly 14 hours of
material recorded at the Crescendo and released them that year as an LP
called “Ella in Hollywood.” But the album didn’t do well, perhaps
because it sounded so strange. In between the songs, for reasons now
unknown, someone spliced in loud applause that had been recorded in a
large concert hall, making the whole album seem artificial. (The
Crescendo was a nightclub of 200 seats.)
Whatever the reasons for
the flat reviews and scant sales, the executives of Verve — which Granz
had sold to MGM in 1960 — put the Crescendo tapes in the vault, where
they were forgotten for the next 27 years.
Then, in 1988, Phil
Schaap, a dogged jazz scholar well known for excavating long-lost
treasures from studio archives, was contracted by PolyGram (which had
recently bought Verve) to compile a discography of all the recordings —
issued and unissued — that Fitzgerald ever made for the label.
Early
on in the task, riffling through PolyGram’s vast tape facility, then in
Edison, N.J., Mr. Schaap unearthed the never-released tapes of a
40th-birthday concert that Fitzgerald recorded at the Teatro Sistina in
Rome on April 25, 1958. He urged PolyGram’s executives to release them.
When they did, as an album called “Ella in Rome,” on the concert’s 30th
anniversary, it soared to No. 1 on Billboard’s jazz chart. Stephen
Holden, in The New York Times, hailed it as “a treasure for the ages.”
It
was soon after this triumph that Mr. Schaap came across the tapes from
the Crescendo Club — not just the tracks that Granz had picked for
“Ella in Hollywood,” which was long out of print, but the other reels,
which nobody had unspooled for nearly three decades.
Mr. Schaap listened to all of them and thought that here was another trove of hidden jewels.
But
by this time Verve was busy producing CD reissues of Fitzgerald hits.
There was no appetite for sifting through what appeared to be the
rejects of an old flop.
And there things stood until late last
year, when Mr. Seidel was re-reading a biography of Fitzgerald by
Stuart Nicholson. In the back of the book was an expanded version of
Mr. Schaap’s discography — 61 pages long — as commissioned by the
author.
Mr. Seidel had been the head of Verve from 1982 to 2002,
signing nearly all its jazz artists and producing most of their albums.
In 2006 the label, which was now owned by Universal Music, rehired him
to produce reissues. The year marked the 50th anniversary of Verve’s
founding — and of some of Ella Fitzgerald’s greatest Verve albums:
“Jazz at the Hollywood Bowl,” “Ella and Louis” with Louis Armstrong , and her first two songbooks (devoted to Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart). There was a demand for lots of Fitzgerald
projects, and Mr. Seidel drew up a list of a dozen possibilities for
the next three years.
One of the last of those projects, and
potentially the most ambitious, was the Crescendo Club sessions.
Scanning Mr. Schaap’s discography, he was struck by how much was put
down on tape at that club — 10 nights’ worth, and another two nights
during a repeat visit, which he’d never known about, in June 1962.
Toward
the end of 2008, in a meeting with Verve’s general manager, Nate Herr,
Mr. Seidel proposed at least taking a listen to those tapes with an eye
toward releasing them. He knew it was a long shot. But Mr. Herr was
game. He was about to inaugurate the Verve Select series, multi-disc
boxed sets of unreleased or out-of-print material. Maybe those
Crescendo tapes could get the series rolling.
A few months later
the company’s engineers sent him some CD copies of the tapes. And so
Mr. Seidel set out on his fateful trip to Massachusetts, listening as
he drove, and he realized he simply had to get the music out. “There
was an intimacy and poignance about them,” he recalled thinking about
the tapes, “that seemed to be brought out by the atmosphere of a small
club.”
Remarkably, with the exception of “Ella in Hollywood” and
“Live at Mr. Kelly’s,” a 1958 Chicago date (which wasn’t released until
2007), there are no Fitzgerald albums recorded live in a small club.
“Mr.
Kelly’s,” another Schaap discovery, was an eyebrow raiser because of
its novelty, but it’s far inferior, musically and sonically, to the
Crescendo sets. The “Ella in Hollywood” album was tarnished not only by
the phony concert-hall applause but also by the fact — which this new
boxed set makes clear — that Granz did a poor job of picking which
tracks to put on the album.
Mr. Schaap has listened to hundreds
of Granz recordings over the decades, including the released master
takes and the unreleased alternate takes. Granz, he said, was “a great
man of profound vision,” but as a record producer, he “infrequently
dwelled at length on what takes should be issued.”
Dan
Morgenstern, director of the Institute of Jazz Studies and a former
good friend of Granz, agrees. “Norman was maybe the most lavish record
producer there ever was,” he said, but he was often “unconcerned or
careless” when it came to preparing and issuing the albums. (Granz died
in 2001.)
“Twelve Nights in Hollywood” is not a complete
document. (If it were, it would consist of more than a dozen CDs, not
four.) But it does include what Mr. Seidel regards as the best version
of nearly every song — 76 out of 83 — that Fitzgerald sang on those
nights. Six of those 76 songs were also included on the “Ella in
Hollywood” album. Because Verve was about to reissue it as well, Mr.
Seidel, to avoid redundancy, picked different versions of those songs,
which she’d sung on different nights from the ones that Granz selected.
On five of those six songs, Mr. Seidel’s choices are clearly better —
more spirited, more playful, more passionate, even bluesier.
The
blues were never Fitzgerald’s strong point; her few stabs at singing
them in the studio came off as lame because it was hard to believe she
had the capacity to be sad. But on these recordings she sings several
blues songs, most notably “St. Louis Blues,” and, while no one would
mistake her for Billie Holiday , she takes them for a bumpy, saucy ride.
When
she scats on these recordings, she goes higher, lower, faster, more
syncopated, more harmonically complex than usual; it sounds like a
really good bebop horn solo, not an affectation, as her scatting on
studio albums sometimes does.
And when she sings a ballad, she
takes the melody in more — and more inventive — directions while still
making it at least as heartbreaking as she ever did in a studio or
large concert hall.
Herman Leonard, the great photographer, once
took a picture of Duke Ellington sitting at a front-row table in a
small New York nightclub, beaming at Fitzgerald while she sang. More
than any other album, “Twelve Nights in Hollywood” gives us an idea of
what Ellington was smiling at.