This is yet another example of how beautiful music recordings were in the 1950s, while somehow everything made in the 1960s managed to sound like absolute crap. The album starts out with two suites of lovely orchestral jazz music. Music lovers are lucky that producers in the 1950s had their shit together. Digital remastering can do a lot, but nothing can duplicate a well-miked, expertly mixed, original live audio recording.
Ella Fitzgerald is amazing. Her voice is so dynamic and she sings with complete control. It's fascinating to hear her change tone between a deep soulful alto perfect for any soft jazz song to a much sharper, more soprano voice for her swing numbers. This is largely an album of standards, timeless songs everyone should recognize and love. Few are more standard than Fitzgerald's version of "Someone To Watch Over Me." Musical perfection.
In contrast, it doesn't matter who sings "Let's Call The Whole Thing Off," it still sounds ridiculous. Unless it's George and Maria from Sesame Street. For me that's the definitive version of this classic. The best part of the Sesame Street cover is it's a hell of a lot shorter, so this one-joke number isn't completely worn out by the time they're talking about the pronunciation of banana. (That happens in the real song, not in the parody version from Sesame Street).
The only real problem with this album is its length. The original "album" was a 5-LP set, which means there are 55 songs for me to digest at once, more than 3 hours worth of music. To get through that I kinda just have to let the music play and not really listen. That obviously works in the album's advantage- I have less time to form critical thoughts. It also works to my advantage, because I don't feel any real pressure. I mean, I never feel pressure because no one reads my blog, but now the pressure's really off. Does anyone really expect me to write a short essay about 55 showtunes I've only heard once?
So I wrote that, then the song "They All Laughed" started with the line, "They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said Earth was round." Ugh... no, they didn't. Intelligent humans have known Earth is round for thousands of years. Columbus wasn't some genius explorer, he was just an asshole looking for gold. "They all laughed at Orville and Wilbur when they said that man could fly." No, they didn't. The Wright Brothers weren't the first people to fly. They were the first to demonstrate controlled flight, but plenty of people were flying rudimentary airplanes around the same time (most of them were crashing). I'm sure I could go on, but I don't want to write an entire entry about one stupid song.
So yeah. It took me three days to listen from start-to-finish because 3 hours is a long time to try and process so many showtunes. It's really good music of course, just an awful lot of it. Ella Fitzgerald is an incredible vocalist, and the Gershwins were great composers. Put them together and you get a hell of an album. Hella long, but still great. 3 stars.
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