This Christmas would possibly simply be Ella Fitzgerald’s Christmas for you and yours. The world-renowned jazz singer’s second Christmas album can be reissued this season in time for all of your vacation festivities.
Initially launched in 1967, Ella Fitzgerald’s Christmas was Fitzgerald’s second vacation LP, in addition to her second full-length for Capitol Information. The album represented a pivot from her first foray into Christmas music, 1960’s Verve launch Ella Needs You a Swinging Christmas, which discovered her placing a jazzy spin on secular seasonal favorites like “Jingle Bells,” “Sleigh Ride,” and “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.”
This time, teaming with producer Dave Dexter Jr., conductor Ralph Carmichael, and arrangers Robert Black and Grace Worth, she zeroed in on the sacred. With preparations starting from smaller instrumental chamber teams to full choral help, she recorded 13 non secular requirements. Or, to place it one other approach, it is a file of Ella Fitzgerald singing timeless classics, most of them—equivalent to “Silent Night,” “O Holy Night,” and “Joy To the World”—are well-known even to those that’ve by no means picked up a hymnal. The periods occurred over two days in the summertime of 1967; it was actually a case of Christmas in July.
Greater than half a century later, the album holds up as one of many all-time Christmas classics. “Ella Fitzgerald’s Christmas is a rarity among rarities in that it is a holiday album that actually holds up as a mature artistic statement,” raved All Music Information in a assessment that concluded by calling it “one of the best Christmas albums ever made.”
Fitzgerald, whose nicknames included “Queen of Jazz” and “First Lady of Song,” was one of many biggest jazz vocalists of the twentieth century. Her legacy as each a musical artist and a civil rights activist is in depth, and Ella Fitzgerald’s Christmas was considered one of her most interesting chapters.
Store for the perfect vacation music on vinyl now.
