A very quick one today. This disc is an album of my Mum’s – an Ella Fitzgerald live album from 1974, recorded live At Ronnie Scott’s in London, April 11, 1974. It’s not typical of my Mum’s very small record collection (mostly Andrew Lloyd Webber and big-name opera sopranos) so I would guess someone else gave her this as a present (maybe her sister, Kit, who was the fashionable one of the 3 sisters).
My Mum died in 2010 and I have kept some of her other albums, mostly for old time’s sake. For example, I’ve still got the Evita album, with Julie Covington as Eva, that got a lot of music-to-make-a-Sunday-roast-to play in our home for a few years after it came out in 1976. I probably still know the whole thing by heart – my Mum loved it. I was always fascinated by lines like, “Screw the middle classes! I will never accept them! My father’s other family were middle class and we were kept out of sight, hidden from view at his funeral”. And people think musicals are all froth.
This Ella Fitzgerald album though, I don’t think I ever heard Mum play it. I probably started to listen to it when visiting her years later (still ages before streaming) and trying to find something to play that wasn’t opera or a musical. I particularly gravitated towards one track – her version of You’ve Got a Friend (hear it here). I love what they do with the song in that version (particularly for some reason “Ella’s got a friend in London, London’s got a friend in Ella” and the clinking of glass in the background here and there, gotta love a cocktail atmosphere). Musicians on that live album are the Tommy Flanagan Quartet (Flanagan on piano, Joe Pass on guitar, Keter Betts on double bass, though the album notes say Keeter, and Bobby Durham on drums).
I’ve been a Carole King fan as long as I’ve known she exists and she wrote You’ve Got a Friend of course (it’s on Tapestry and she released a version of the song in 1971, as did James Taylor at around the same time). Now we have another musicals fan in the family it seems totally apt that we saw the Carole King musical Beautiful some years back and can report that it is amazing (daughter Heather wrote about it here). I think my Mum would have enjoyed the musical (lead song: “You’ve got to get up every morning, With a smile on your face, And show the world all the love in your heart”). The show is a tough tale but with a hard line in positivity, very much my Mum’s vibe. I would add, these days, that it’s actually OK to be miserable in the morning as well, because life is complicated, but we all know what CK was getting at. Here is a live version of the title song from King, in 1973:
Just one more post in this series. Lots of shifts this week, so it will be short and squeezed in. See you tomorrow for that.
For the first intro post to this series go here.
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