‘The Lost Berlin Tapes’ by Ella Fitzgerald Review: Always in Full Swing

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

On March 25, 1962, Ella Fitzgerald returned to Berlin, the scene of one of her greatest recorded triumphs - the Grammy award-winning Mack the Knife. What wasn’t known, until now, is that this sublime concert was recorded and the tapes remained sealed, unopened in their box for 58 years.

Ella: The Lost Berlin Tapes finds the First Lady of Song at the absolute pinnacle of her powers, performing some of her best-loved songs as well as some that qualify as rarities in her catalogue.

As always with Ella, the warmth and joy of her voice turn the performance into a prolonged celebration of Jazz, singing and life itself. 

The following review by Will Friedwald appeared in the October 5, 2020 print edition of The Wall Street Journal.  

© Copyright ® Will Friedwald and The Wall Street Journal, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

On a newly released recording of a 1962 concert in West Berlin, the singer performs with her usual dynamism and style accompanied by her long time musical director Paul Smith on piano, Wilfred Meadowbrooks on bass and Stan Levey on drums.

“Thirty seconds of listening to “Cheek to Cheek,” the opening track of the newly released “The Lost Berlin Tapes” (Verve), makes it clear that we are hearing, at her pinnacle, the greatest of all artists American music has ever offered. And yet what we experience on this previously unheard concert recording from March 25, 1962, was just business as usual for Ella Fitzgerald—she performed at this level, or nearly so, every night of her long professional life. To truly surprise us, she would have had to give a performance in which she doesn’t swing, generates no excitement, and sings without any feeling. Obviously, this never happened.

It’s a famous part of the Fitzgerald story that she first entered an Apollo Theater amateur night contest (at 17 in 1934) as a dancer, but switched to singing at the last minute when she saw that a popular dance act was performing right before her. She won the competition singing—but in a real sense, her music is all about dancing. In the earliest part of her professional career, during her tenure with drummer Chick Webb’s orchestra, Fitzgerald was christened the “princess of the Savoy,” and it would have been appropriate for her to spend the rest of her career working in such ballrooms, rather than clubs or concert halls.

Not only does she begin the 1962 concert at West Berlin’s Sportpalast with “Cheek to Cheek” (singing Berlin in Berlin) but the beat never stops. Even when Fitzgerald is singing about not dancing, in “I Won’t Dance,” she never stops swinging. She uses rhythm to differentiate between the diverse songs in her 17-number set. “I Won’t Dance” includes a reference to the twist, and “Hallelujah, I Love Him So” begins with a grandly baroque piano introduction by musical director Paul Smith and goes on to introduce an R&B backbeat into Fitzgerald’s powerful 4/4 swing time.

A few years earlier, inspired by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, Fitzgerald had greatly expanded her musical purview by incorporating elements of modern jazz into her music. Though she increased her capacity for harmonic improvisation, she stuck to her long-established principles of pure melody and unceasing swing. While there’s no long scat number (like “How High the Moon?”) in this concert, her big improv-driven piece here is “Mr. Paganini,” in which she ingeniously deploys scat as part of a longer narrative.

Even Fitzgerald’s ballads are driven by rhythm. Unlike Billie Holiday, she rarely slowed down to full rubato; “Someone to Watch Over Me” and “Angel Eyes” are the perfect tempo for romantic social dancing. And although some observers have argued that Fitzgerald doesn’t always “care” about the words she sang, it’s hard to imagine anyone putting more feeling into these lyrics. “Someone to Watch Over Me” movingly reveals the heart of a woman who’s spent her life looking for the right man, while “Cry Me a River” and “Good Morning Heartache” are laments to the man who got away.

As in most of her concerts, Fitzgerald carefully modulates the mood, balancing between swingers (like the relatively rare “My Kind of Boy” and “Clap Hands! Here Comes Charlie”) and what she called “pretty” numbers, like her blissfully warm and maternal “Summertime.” But by the time she finishes “Paganini,” the crowd is so ecstatic that she realizes there’s no dialing it back down. She even kicks things up a notch with “Mack the Knife,” the German theater song that caused a sensation at her legendary concert in the same city two years earlier. On that occasion, Fitzgerald had famously forgotten the lyrics but made musical history by devising new ones on the spot. She sings all the right words here (although she does forget what city she’s in) and attains an even higher level of exhilaration.

Then she does something extraordinary — rather than end with a very fast improv number, she concludes by slowing down. Fitzgerald characteristically generated incredible excitement with an uptempo blues like “Roll ’Em Pete,” but she rarely sang a slow one such as this. She starts with the lyrics to Big Joe Turner’s “Wee Baby Blues,” but soon begins making up her own: “I could go on singing all night long. But the union man tells us we’re through.” By the time she reaches the coda (thanking the German crowd with “danke schön”), she has us convinced that she could have been one of the world’s best blues singers had she done this kind of material more often. There was nothing that she couldn’t sing. No matter how great we expect her to be, she’s always even better.”

—Mr. Friedwald writes about music and popular culture for the Journal.