One of the artists Norman Granz managed was Ella Fitzgerald. I used to have a dozen LPs of hers, but they all went away and I only have a couple of CDs. Last weekend, with a special 10¢/song deal at my favorite semi-legal download site (and a lot of boredom), I decided to remedy that.
Found all of the Songbooks (Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, others -- which I think were her best work) available there for dirt cheap. Decided I could not choose which songs I wanted, so I went crazy and spent like $25 to download them all.
256 songs, 15-1/2 hours of music.
All in stunning fidelity.
Put them on 3 CD-Rs as MP3s, because all of my players do MP3 discs too. Then I realized, hey, I should put them on a USB stick too. I had a couple empty 32G sticks on hand. All of the above only came to like 9 gigs.
So I've been listening to this is my car all week, on random shuffle, and god damn it's nice. All of the songbooks were done about the same time -- 1957-1965 -- and all were produced by Norman Granz using the best sidemen in his roster. All of the renditions are top notch, not a stinker in the pot. Ella was at her peak powers -- which were considerable.
God damn!
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