Word: granz
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...started singing with Chick Webb's Big Band in the mid-'30s, when she was still a teenager, and later did a lot of swinging and scatting with Dizzy Gillespie. But it was her collaboration in the '50s with producer/manager Norman Granz on a benchmark series of "songbook" albums that gave Fitzgerald the musical regentship that never passed from her. "Norman felt that I should do other things," she remembered, "so he produced the Cole Porter Songbook with me. It was a turning point in my life...
Together--and often working with the brilliant arranging skills of Nelson Riddle--Fitzgerald and Granz then went on to songbooks for the likes of Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Duke Ellington, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Irving Berlin and Johnny Mercer, the great composers of the great era of American popular music. Those songbooks became the foundation of a legacy, the single source for a musical standard that Fitzgerald, as much as anyone, helped make timeless. "Some kids in Italy call me 'Mama Jazz,'" she recalled. "I thought that was so cute. As long as they...
...Schaap has included 1 1/2 hours of newly discovered material, rehearsals in 1955 where Lady Day runs through some tunes, runs over a little history ("Jesus Christ. Man broke my heart and I needed the loot"), runs down some collaborators ("The dirty bum," she says of her producer, Norman Granz. "I hate that son of a bitch") and in general gives a strong account of the spirit that kept her vital even as her body was giving...