The Last Page

...Louis impersonates, Ella arpeggiates, and all is swell...

...The clumsiest parsing in the lyrics—"Soon you will be on Sugar Hill in Harlem"—sounds conversational and natural in Ella's rendition...

...I'm daydreaming of course, but Ella's death has sent me into mourning, and a man is entitled to his consolations...

...I wouldn't dare to hazard a thesis as to why those several qualities long ago ceased to adhere in a single musical style...

...The hottest pop music anywhere in the world today is Latin Caribbean—the most intricately rhythmic, the most virtuosic in its horn soloing (for example, the trumpet pyrotechnics of Arturo Sandoval, the Cuban refugee), the most disciplined in its ensemble playing (for example, the clockwork massed saxophone figures of Dominican merengue), the prickliest, the most thrilling...

...Whole sheafs of first-rate songs fall outside Ella's narrative or acting ability...

...To listen to her try to enunciate Porter's double entendres and wit can be positively embarrassing...

...What will happen when the traditional twin capitals of the Afro-Cuban style—Havana and New York—are finally able to reestablish their ancient musical brotherliness...

...Ella was a singer's singer, which is not an altogether good thing...

...The gift that she does have, as a lyric interpreter, is a rhythmic suavity, which you experience principally as a sense of ease...

...She uses her range of vocal effects—now violin-like (for example, in the hands of Ellington's Stuff Smith), now like a sweet-toned alto saxophone, now like a trumpet shaking a note or a slithery trombone—to push the sound of her voice into a higher and higher energy, until she crackles...

...Ella's greatness came about because of an unusual combination of musical events: the vogue of the big bands (with Ellington as the foam on the wave), combined with the high tide of the musical theater (meaning Porter and Gershwin), which led to a music that was original, creative, sophisticated, and yet—this is the part that astonishes us today—popular...

...Something splendid, I predict...

...and the happier I was, the more perplexed I felt about the state of American music...

...The reason her duets with Louis Armstrong are so memorable and charming is because his own acting talent is great enough to compensate for hers, and vice versa with her vocal technique...

...Her absolutely best work is something you can hear only in a setting like that of the Duke Ellington orchestra, where the harmonic colors and the rhythmic sizzle are everything, and the theatrical or narrative aspects of a song are pushed to the background...

...She was the jazz equivalent of a great opera soprano who can't act worth a damn...

...Who can doubt, upon learning that Ella Fitzgerald has died, which way the musical arts in America have been going...

...Her performances are at one with Ellington's ideals: a magnificent color spectrum, pointed toward ever more intensity...

...144 • DISSENT...

...For the arts follow a very strange history, now up into greatness, now down, in no visible relation to the ups and downs of any other kind of history...

...After Ella Fitzgerald died last June, I picked out a few CDs, played them over and over, and became happier and happier at what I heard (except in the case of a horrible album with Andre Previn on piano, and a few cuts of the Cole Porter songbook, funereally arranged...

...Allow me a guess: it will be in those several musical locales where the connection between dance music and big band serious jazz never did entirely die away, namely, wherever Afro-Cuban music has left its influence...

...But where should we look for some such coming together in the future...

...Ellington is a master of bringing out the idiosyncratic timbres of each instrument and section, and in the Ellington arrangements Ella emerges as the band musician with the most variable timbre of all...