Ella Sings Broadway


Ella Sings Broadway is a 1963 studio album by the American jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald, with an orchestra arranged and conducted by the American bandleader Marty Paich. Ella had previously recorded with Paich and his more familiar Dek-tette on the 1957 album Ella Swings Lightly, and was to record with him again on her 1967 album Whisper Not. Shortly before the sessions for Ella Sings Broadway , Ella had recorded two singles with Marty Paich, the Antonio Carlos Jobim song 'Desafinado' and a Bossa Nova version of the jazz standard 'Stardust'.
This album is a musical departure for Ella in many senses. As the author David Hajdu comments in his liner notes for the 2001 reissue of Ella Sings Broadway , virtually every important singer of standards had recorded an album of musical-theatre songs, Sinatra with My Kind of Broadway and The Concert Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan with Great Songs From Hit Shows and Doris Day with Show Time .
These singers, especially Sinatra and Fitzgerald, had acquired a reputation of being consummate performers of the Great American Songbook, a songbook which by and large had been written before the outbreak of the Second World War, and which had been aped in its popularity with youth by Rock and Roll by the time of the Vietnam War. With many George and Ira Gershwin, Porter and Berlin standards having been written in the 1920s and 1930s, whilst Sinatra and Fitzgerald were growing up.
On Ella Sings Broadway , Ella connects with the Broadway songs of the previous decade and a half, vastly different in musical terms to the Great American Songbook standards from 40 years previously.
The twelve songs are from eight musicals, being;
Awarded 4 stars by Down Beat jazz magazine in 1963, the review commented that it was "A perfect complement to Fitzgerald's classic series of 'Song Book' albums".

Track listing

For the 1963 Verve LP release; Verve V6-4059; Re-issued in 2001 on CD, Verve 549 373-2
Side One:
  1. "Hernando's Hideaway" – 3:17
  2. "If I Were a Bell" – 2:22
  3. "Warm All Over" – 2:46
  4. "Almost Like Being in Love" – 3:02
  5. "Dites-Moi" – 2:30
  6. "I Could Have Danced All Night" – 2:22
Side Two:
  1. "Show Me" – 2:22
  2. "No Other Love" – 2:20
  3. "Steam Heat" – 3:27
  4. "Whatever Lola Wants" – 3:13
  5. "Guys and Dolls" – 2:21
  6. "Somebody Somewhere" – 3:12

    Personnel

Recorded October 1–4, 1962 at Capitol Studios, Hollywood, Los Angeles:
Tracks 1-12
Others Unknown.