I enjoyed this album greatly, developing a real respect for Fitzgerald. I've been stepping out of my comfort zone a lot recently, and it's been an enjoyable experience. The Songbook series continued, but I don't think I will. Me, however, I have an almost superstitious attraction to the 12-track album, and anything more than that would stretch credibility, I think. Each side is nearly thirty minutes, a rather amazing feat for 1956 unless the discs were either incredibly tinny or incredibly prone to scratching. The original is long, not merely eight songs per side but eight frequently extended recordings. It's certainly not half of the Verve original - it's a good deal shorter than that. Regarding my ultimate tracklist, I think my single-disc plays well, moving through moods much like his stage musicals themselves must have. I would say that I attempted to evaluate Fitzgerald and Bregman, after all the authors of this particular aural document, more than Porter himself, but ultimately I was looking for a cohesive and memorable listening experience, and that quite obviously involves both. I don't claim to have successfully answered those questions. You can tell sincere effort was put into every one of these recordings, and the result is frequently stunning.īut the nature of the project causes me to reconsider the entire thing I do here: to what extent is my job to critique Cole Porter's compositions and to what extent Ella Fitzgerald's performances? Should a lacklustre take on a genius song be included above a gripping recording of a run-of-the-mill tune? And furthermore, while the 32-track double gains a certain amount of gravitas and authority from its sheer bulk (while no means a comprehensive take on the prolific Porter's work, it's certainly more than a mere overview), how can I make my truncated single-disc be anything more than merely 'a dozen Porter songs assembled more or less randomly', or even worse 'the most ubiquitous dozen of Porter's stand-bys assembled for the millionth time'? At 32 tracks and almost two hours, this is epic in side, but there's never a workaday feel. But it was a major statement at the time, both in that it was the first time a project of this magnitude was attempted and also in that Fitzgerald and conductor/arranger Buddy Bregman put a hell of a lot of fine detail work into these performances. So this is a 'cover album', really - tribute album, in modern parlance. Working together with the amazing vocalist Ella Fitzgerald, he set out to enshrine these composers in a series of 'songbook' releases, that with varying degrees of comprehensiveness, tried to 'catalogue' their works. And a great one it was too - that the USA had produced a handful of songwriters, working primarily in the medium of stage musicals, every bit the equal of the revered composers of the European classical tradition. So what is it? Well, it's Norman Granz, owner of Verve Records, trying to make a 'statement'. It's the fact that this particular Cole Porter volume is the first, from 1956, that made me want to take it on. This current two-hour double-record set is only the first of a lengthy series of releases, some of which were as much as four-disc boxed sets. Of course, that turns out not to be the case at all - there are several outside of rock that precede it. I had read that one of either Blonde on Blonde or Freak Out! was the first double-album of the rock era, and somehow I convinced myself that meant 'the first double-album ever', at least twelve inches in size and 33 rpm in speed.
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