Every Song I Love — 4. Ella Fitzgerald : How High The Moon (Live in Berlin)
I’m not, generally, a fan of live albums. They tend to lack of the sound quality of studio recordings, but also never really reproduce the energy or the experience of actually being there. It’s kind of the worst of all worlds. There are exceptions of course. Nirvana’s ‘Unplugged in New York’ is one of my favourite records of all time, featuring songs and arrangements we never otherwise would have heard. And that’s when live records are at their best, when they are recording something that would, for one reason or another, never be heard in the studio.
I first came across today’s song in the documentary, ‘Ella Fitzgerald: Just One Of Those Things’. Whilst I’ve started to become more interested in jazz in recent years, having dismissed it for much of my life (A topic for another time I’m sure), it has been the post-war jazz of the likes of John Coltrane, Miles Davis & Max Roach, or even more contemporary records by Kamasi Washington & Rosie Turton. I haven’t listened much to the earlier jazz singers, and I didn’t have any particular interest in Ella Fitzgerald. However, I will watch almost any music documentary available.
The element of jazz singing I understood least was scat singing. I’d always found it kind of naff, vaguely embarrassing, and just didn’t understand it or why it existed. Then, on the documentary, they showed a clip of Ella Fitzgerald’s version of ‘How High The Moon’ recorded live in Berlin in 1960, and it all suddenly made sense.
It starts as a fairly standard arrangement of the song, but turns into an extended scat from Fitzgerald, and it quickly becomes apparent that scat is all about the voice as an instrument in its’ purest form. It doesn’t matter that the words are nonsense, in fact it’s essential that the words are nonsense, because it’s not about the words. Words are a distraction. This is about showing what the human voice can do. It’s equivalent to a sax solo, a drum solo, or any other instrumental solo in a jazz record, except that that the instrument this time is Ella Fitzgerald’s voice, and the things it does over the course of 8 minutes are absolutely stunning, the range, the variety the talent!
How High The Moon doesn’t just show off Fitzgerald’s vocal abilities though. The song becomes a commentary on itself, with Fitzgerald interjecting “I guess these people just wonder what I’m singing”, mid-scat, or “I guess I’d better quit while I’m ahead” at the end of one section, before dipping briefly back into the main song or turning Smoke Gets In My Eyes into “sweat gets in my eyes” as she visibly perspires at the end of a long, intense, show. It’s a reaction to that particular place, that particular moment, in the best traditions of improvisational music.
This song is also a precursor of the DJ set. In a good DJ set, the crowd responds to the DJ, but the DJ also responds to the reactions of the crowd, creating a symbiotic relationship which results in a different performance every time. And this is exactly what’s happening here. Unlikely many live shows, this exact performance would never have happened on a different night, in a different town, with a different audience. The extended scat sections remind me specifically of the techno DJ sets I used to dance to in my younger days. The long periods of scat being reminiscent of the extended periods of what you might call ‘functional techno’, designed to keep the crowd dancing, but these would be interspersed with snippets of more recognisable songs, just as Fitzgerald does here.
These moments of familiarity were all the more powerful for emerging from the unfamiliar. When How High The Moon unexpectedly burst into Smoke Get Your Eyes at the end of the song, it’s a stunning, ecstatic moment, much like when say, Dave Clarke would drop an electro-pop classic like Tainted Love at the end of his techno set, and the crowd would go wild. It’s the unexpected nature of it that makes it more powerful. In music, as in life, context is everything.
It’s also like the best DJ sets, in that it tells a story (takes you on a journey, if you want to use the cliche), rather than just being a series of unconnected songs. How High The Moon’s story, is the story of Fitzgerald’s career. The snippets of songs she bursts into include everything from her first ever hit “A Tisket A Tasket” to the aforementioned Smoke Gets In Your Eyes (an old song in itself, but a recent hit for The Platters at the time).
It’s worth saying at this point, that How High The Moon is a great song in its own right, but this How High The Moon is so much more than just How High The Moon. It’s a wonderful piece of music on so many levels, and a stunning performance. Rarely in the history of music can so much have been achieved in the space of 8 minutes.
Originally published at http://markjwray.com on February 12, 2024.
