Ella Fitzgerald German Tapes

10 CD box set of sixteen original jazz albums from the Godmother of female jazz, Ella Fitzgerald. Including the legendary Porgy and Bess with Louis Armstrong and milestone recordings like Ella sings Gershwin and Rhythm is My Business.

Simply a grand and eloquent performance put together by Verve records highlighting the best years of Ella Fitzgerald – that sassy, charming legendary singer in jazz. The Best of the Songbooks features a captivating lineup of some of jazz's greatest composers and arrangers. It is here that Fitzgerald records and sings songs of Cole Porter, Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, George & Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, and Johnny Mercer.

It all began with a coincidence and complicity between Ronald Trisch, the head of the East German music agency, and Horst Lippmann, the West Berlin representative of major American artists. In January 1967, Ella Fitzgerald toured Europe with Duke Ellington and his orchestra. After a concert in West Berlin, January 25 was a day off. They jumped at the chance to organize a somewhat adventurous "detour" for Ella to East Berlin. At 11 p.m. on Wednesday evening, 3,000 people flocked to the Friedrichstadt Palace. This appearance in East Berlin would be the only one of her career. No big orchestra behind her, but the 3 exceptional musicians of the Jimmy Jones Trio to accompany her.

This is an eight-CD set more for Duke Ellington fanatics than for general listeners. Originally, some of the music came out as a two-LP set (Ella and Duke at the Cote D'Azur) and a single album (Ellington's Soul Call), but the great majority of the material was previously unreleased when this box came out in 1998.

It is difficult to know where to begin when approaching an artist as wonderful as Ella Fitzgerald, especially when covering a revered recording like Sings the Irving Berlin Song Book from the late '50s. This set includes two CDs with 32 songs chosen from Berlin's collection of nearly 800 songs. These selections are perfectly suited for Fitzgerald's voice and her romantic sensibility; they are happy, occasionally sad, and full of swinging rhythm. A few of these songs - "Cheek to Cheek," "Puttin' on the Ritz," and "Blue Skies" - will be most familiar; others, "Top Hat, White Tie, and Tails," "Russian Lullaby," and "All By Myself" are as memorable but perhaps less known. Choices like "Isn't This a Lovely Day?" feature everything a listener would want in a song: intelligent lyrics, memorable melodies, and a strong emotional center…

Recorded in 1957, Ella & Louis Again re-teams Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong after the success of their first album and a popular series of concerts at the Hollywood Bowl the previous year. Stylistically, Fitzgerald and Armstrong had very different histories; he started out in Dixieland before branching out into classic jazz and swing, whereas Fitzgerald started out as a swing-oriented big-band vocalist before becoming an expert bebopper…

Ella Jane Fitzgerald (April 25, 1917 - June 15, 1996) was an American jazz vocalist with a vocal range spanning three octaves. Often referred to as the "First Lady of Song" and the "Queen of Jazz," she was noted for her purity of tone, impeccable diction, phrasing and intonation, and a "horn-like" improvisational ability, particularly in her scat singing. Fitzgerald was a notable interpreter of the Great American Songbook. Over the course of her 60-year recording career, she sold 40 million copies of her 70-plus albums, won 14 Grammy Awards and received during her career many other major awards and honors.