Jazz

Ella: The Lost Berlin Tapes

Ella’s recently discovered Berlin tapes demonstrated her style and dynamism at her prime in 1962.

Ella: The Lost Berlin Tapes

Ella Fitzgerald performed a show in Berlin in 1962 but the recording was presumed lost. That is until the tapes were discovered in an archive.

Here’s what Giovanni Russonello thought about it:

On the album, Fitzgerald is in her mid-40s, and well established as popular music royalty. Hear the breadth and depth of her vibrato, the way she uses strong breath to give rhythmic passages a punch, how she reinvents the melody to Ray Charles’s “Hallelujah! I Love Her So” as if her voice were a saxophone with words.

George W. Harris gave it a glowing review for Jazz Weekly:

There is a surfeit of hard hitting and exuberant swing here, something missing from today’s musicians and vocalists. Where did we go wrong?

Ella: The Lost Berlin Tapes is now available in stores and various streaming platforms and you can stream it on Spotify.

Hi, it's Luke, the editor of Sampleface! Why not subscribe to my Patreon and support the blog?

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.