My great-Uncle Clemie was a jazz fanatic. A quiet, practically invisible insurance executive by day, he haunted smoky New York jazz clubs at night becoming a wild man, pounding booze and slapping tables in time with beats meted out by the likes of Max Roach, Kenny Clarke and Art Blakey. However, it was jazz singing and scatting that he adored, and when Ella Fitzgerald was in town, Clemie took up residence in the club she was at for her entire run.
Were Clemie alive today, he’d have arrived at The Jazz Record Center last Tuesday about an hour before they opened to purchase the new Verve tribute album, We All Love Ella: Celebrating the First Lady of Song. While not an entirely successful album, it’s a brilliant reminder of Fitzgerald’s legacy.
The album features a roster of stars, both past and present, putting their own special bent on Ella’s music. Tracks include Natalie Cole on “A Tisket, A Tasket,” Chaka Khan doing “Lullaby of Birdland,” Dianne Reeves working “Oh, Lady be Good,” Linda Ronstadt singing “Miss Otis Regrets,” and Michael Buble crooning on “Too Close for Comfort.” These renditions are good, but the vocalists sound like they’re trying a little too hard to evoke Fitzgerald rather than applying their own styles to the songs. To be fair, this may be the fault of producer Phil Ramone, who possibly wanted traditional interpretations, a somewhat anti-jazz direction.
These tracks also suffer from some treacley instrumental arrangements from Rob Mounsey, making some of the album too subdued for the likes of power vocalists like Queen Latifah, Reeves, and Khan. It’s interesting to compare these particular tracks with the two Fitzgerald recordings featured on We All Love Ella - including a previously unreleased live piece with Stevie Wonder on “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” on which Ella’s vibe is so energetic, it sends Wonder’s back-up band into overdrive.
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