Ella and Louis

Ella and Louis is a 1956 studio album by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, accompanied by the Oscar Peterson Quartet. Having previously collaborated in the late 1940s for the Decca label, this was the first of three albums that Fitzgerald and Armstrong were to record together for Verve Records.

The Album

Norman Granz, the founder of the Verve label, selected eleven ballads for Fitzgerald and Armstrong, mainly played in a slow or moderate tempo.

The success of Ella and Louis was replicated by Ella and Louis Again and Porgy and Bess. All three were released as The Complete Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong on Verve.

Verve released the album also as one of the first ones in Super Audio Compact Disc (SACD).

Reception

Writing for Allmusic, music critic Scott Yanow wrote of the album "Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong make for a charming team on this CD... this is primarily a vocal set with the emphasis on tasteful renditions of ballads."^[1]

Jasen and Jones called the set a "pinnacle of popular singing".^[2]

The Penguin Guide to Jazz compiled by Richard Cook and Brian Morton, rated the album with four stars.

Track listing

For the 1957 Verve LP album, Verve V-4003

Re-released by PolyGram-Verve on Cd in 1989: Verve-PolyGram 825 373-2.

Side One:

1. "Can't We Be Friends?" (Paul James, Kay Swift) – 3:45
2. "Isn't This a Lovely Day?" (Irving Berlin) – 6:14
3. "Moonlight in Vermont" (John Blackburn, Karl Suessdorf) – 3:40
4. "They Can't Take That Away from Me" (George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin) – 4:36
5. "Under a Blanket of Blue" (Jerry Livingston, Al J. Neiburg, Marty Symes) – 4:16
6. "Tenderly" (Walter Gross, Jack Lawrence) - 5:05

Side Two:

1. "A Foggy Day" (G. Gershwin, I. Gershwin) – 4:31
2. "Stars Fell on Alabama" (Mitchell Parish, Frank Perkins) – 3:32
3. "Cheek to Cheek" (Berlin) – 5:52
4. "The Nearness of You" (Hoagy Carmichael, Ned Washington) – 5:40
5. "April in Paris" (Vernon Duke, Yip Harburg) – 6:33

Personnel

• Louis Armstrong - vocals, trumpet
• Ella Fitzgerald - vocals
• Ray Brown - bass
• Herb Ellis - guitar
• Oscar Peterson - piano
• Buddy Rich - drums

• Val Valentin - session engineer
• Phil Stern - photography

Sources

1. ^ ^{a b} Yanow, Scott. "Ella and Louis > Review". Allmusic. http://www.allmusic.com/album/r138694. Retrieved June 28, 2011. 
2. ^ Black Bottom Stomp: Eight Masters of Ragtime and Early Jazz, by David A. Jasen and Gene Jones, 272 pages, Routledge Chapman & Hall (September 2001), ISBN 0415936411, ISBN 978-0415936415]