Saturday, May 12, 2007 :::  
We Love Ella!

Jazz is amazing. It really is.

The thing that really got me into Jazz was Ella Fitzgerald. When I was around 15 or 16 I was watching some award show with my family (it was probably the Grammy's of 1996) and they were doing a tribute to Ella Fitzgerald (I think it was the year she died, so they did a "In Memoriam Tribute.") Natalie Cole came on and sang an old Ella favorite, "Mr. Paganini" (Here's the Windows Media Player link from amazon). It was absolutely amazing. I was enchanted with the melody and the story of the song. (Mr. Paganini is a conductor and he finishes his concert without playing one of his great songs, to the chagrin of someone in the audience, who shouts and begs him to sing it.) The next day I had my dad take me to the mall and buy me one of her CD's. It was this great big collection (For the Love of Ella) that instantly became one of my favorite CD's. Ella cemented my love for Jazz. I was mildly interested before, but after, I was a fanatic.

Ella is famous for forgetting the words to songs. On the CD I mentioned above, there's a live recording of her forgetting the words to "Mac The Knife." Instead of " From a tugboat by the river / A cement bag's dropping down" she sang "Ahh what's the next chorus to this song now / this is the one now I don't know."

So about a month and a half ago, Bella calls me and wants to know if I want to go to this concert at USC's Galen Center that's a tribute to Ella Fitzgerald on the day that she'd turn 90 if she were still alive. Of course I wanted to go. So she got tickets. =)

It was awesome. Here's a list of some of the people that were singing:

• Natalie Cole
• Nancy Wilson
• Wynonna
  
• Patti Austin
• Stevie Wonder

We think we saw Samuel L. Jackson in the audience, but he was far away.

They were recording it for television, so they had to redo a couple of songs due to technical issues. It's supposed to be on PBS' Great Performances at the beginning of June.

Here's Bella and I afterwards:



Amazing! (Both Bella and the show)

::: posted by Soup at 11:29 PM:::

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