The Moment Of Truth:
Ella At The Coliseum
by Robin Kidson
The summer of 1967 has gone down in cultural history as “The Summer of Love”: flower power, hippies, San Francisco, The Grateful Dead – older readers will remember. At the height of that summer, on 30th June 1967, the Oakland Coliseum in California hosted a concert organised by the jazz promoter and impresario, Norman Granz. It was a typical Norman Granz star studded bill which included Oscar Peterson, Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald who took the last set.
Ella’s performance was professionally recorded by Wally Heider, something of a legend for his skills and innovations in remote recording. For reasons which remain unclear, the 4-track tapes of the performance then disappeared into Norman Granz’s possession and the Oakland concert was largely forgotten. Granz died in 2001 and the Oakland tapes might have been lost forever had they not been recently rediscovered in Granz’s private tape library. Suitably remixed and remastered, the tapes have been released on a superb new album on the Verve record label called The Moment Of Truth : Ella At The Coliseum.
Over an unusually long career – which began in the 1930s and was still going strong in the 1980s – Ella Fitzgerald built up a formidable reputation as one of the greatest of all jazz singers. The purity of her voice combined with a natural ability to swing and improvise won widespread admiration as did her skill at interpreting even the most banal Tin Pan Alley song and making something special out of it. She was also one of the few jazz musicians whose appeal crossed over from a specifically jazz audience to a much broader mainstream one without losing too much jazz credibility on the way.
Part of her success is down to Norman Granz. Granz is a key figure in post war jazz credited with taking jazz out of the night club and into the concert hall. He had a multiplicity of roles: concert promoter, producer, record label founder/boss and manager. He was a success at all of them whilst retaining a strong sense of social and racial justice, insisting, for example, on equal pay for both black and white musicians, and integrated audiences for the concerts he promoted.
Norman Grantz and Ella Fitzgerald :
Archives Center, National Museum of American History
Granz became Ella’s manager in the late 1940s and carefully set about ensuring her talents were presented to the largest possible audience. In 1956, he founded Verve Records, largely as a vehicle for Ella. In the process, Verve became one of the best known labels for both jazz and popular music more generally. In 1960, Verve was sold to MGM but Ella continued to record for it until 1966. Granz also continued as her manager and close friend.
Ella Fitzgerald died in 1996 at the age of 79 but her fame has continued to grow helped by a programme of regular reissues and compilations, tribute albums by various artists, and critically acclaimed documentaries of her life and work shown on prime time TV including the BBC and Sky Arts. The BBC, in particular, has a large library of her performances and regularly shows these. In addition, a whole slew of younger singers have attested to her influence including Adele, Lady Gaga, Mica Paris and KT Tunstall. So, a whole new audience for Ella Fitzgerald has come into being.
All of which goes some way to explaining why the release of The Moment Of Truth : Ella At The Coliseum has aroused such interest both in the specialist music press but also in the mainstream media. The album isn’t a reissue of a reissue of a reissue nor some dodgily recorded live gig; this is brand new Ella, live, backed by the best musicians of the day and sounding like it was recorded yesterday using all the most modern technology. That’s partly a tribute to Wally Heider but also to those who have mixed and mastered it from the original analogue tapes.
Throughout her career, Ella Fitzgerald had a close working relationship with Duke Ellington and his Orchestra, recording and touring together at various times. Both in 1966 and 1967, they embarked on long tours in the US and Europe. In the months before Oakland, they performed in a series of Norman Granz promoted concerts together with other big jazz stars of the time including Oscar Peterson. The concerts at the Carnegie Hall in March 1967 and the Hollywood Bowl in June and July 1967 were recorded and released in 1974 with the modest title of The Greatest Jazz Concert in the World.
The Oakland concert on June 30th 1967 happened between the two Hollywood Bowl gigs and had a similar all-star bill. For her set, Ella was backed by a trio of Jimmy Jones (piano), Bob Cranshaw (bass) and Sam Woodyard (drums) together with members of Duke Ellington’s Orchestra (though not the Duke himself).
The Orchestra stays very much in the background on most of the nine tracks, the main exception being the opening number from which the album takes its name, The Moment Of Truth (Scott/Satterwhite). This is an up-tempo, high energy offering with the band in all its fullness and glory. As with the rest of the album, Ella is on the very top of her game blending seamlessly with the musicians and showing she can swing with the best of them. An animated video has been made of the track:
It’s sometimes said that Ella couldn’t sing the blues but she is in fine swinging bluesy form on Sampson and Parish's Don’t Be That Way.
The sheer quality of Ella’s voice and her almost instinctive musicality shine through on each and every track particularly on a ballad like Bacharach and David’s Alfie. This is a typical Bacharach melody – deceptively simple on the surface but complex in reality. Ella handles it with aplomb. Backed only by the trio she gives what feels like a definitive version of this familiar song. She captures its mood – a sort of knowing wistfulness – perfectly. When she hits some of the higher notes, its spine tingling. She plays it pretty straight but, towards the end, suddenly launches into a couple of bluesy bars of You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You with an appropriate upping of the tempo. Then the main theme returns as if nothing has happened. The whole piece is a tour de force, arguably the best track on the album.
There is one other ballad in the programme – Fischer and Carey's You’ve Changed. This has some luscious work by the full orchestra and, oh, that voice!
The album is a live one which captures the atmosphere well. The audience is enthusiastic, raucously so at times. Ella sounds completely at her ease with absolute confidence in both her singing and her ability to hold the stage and handle the audience. Good humour pervades on all sides with all sorts of little jokes and comments. For example, at the end of Alfie, an audience member shouts “If you love her, clap!” and Ella chuckles. After the first song, Ella laughingly calls out to a latecomer in the audience “You missed the first song!” Elsewhere, there is a bit of business – which we can only hear, not see – where someone apparently offers Ella a drink which sets her off on jokes about appearing with Dean Martin.
As well as Alfie, the programme includes another pop song of the era, the Sid Ramin penned Music To Watch Girls By. The beat alternates between a slightly awkward latin staccato and a glorious swing. There is a brief interlude when a slice of Happy Talk is injected into the proceedings. The whole is a typical example of Ella taking what is, in effect, a pop song and turning it into jazz – proper jazz.
Ella sings like a jazz instrumentalist plays, dancing around the tune, bending it, taking it in unexpected directions sometimes to another tune altogether. She is particularly renowned for her skill at scat singing where her improvisations are not in words but in the sort of sounds a trumpet or a saxophone might make. On the track In A Mellow Tone, for instance, Ella goes into full scat mode with an impressive array of sounds. The actual song more or less disappears into the whoops, deedle-dees and made up, sometimes nonsensical, lyrics. Her voice swoops up and down the scales in a dazzling display of virtuosity, occasionally showing a harsher edge.
There are no videos of the Oakland concert so one can’t see Ella in full flow. However, throughout her career, she was often filmed. Here she is with Oscar Peterson much later in her career but still firing on most cylinders singing and scatting her way through In A Mellow Tone
Scat also comes into play on the old standard, Bye Bye Blackbird , where, again, she changes the lyrics and shows off her vocal gymnastics. On both Bye Bye Blackbird and In A Mellow Tone, Ella and her musicians hit a collective groove, losing themselves in some other realm where they could apparently go on automatically forever. These sort of moments in jazz are sheer joy both for the musicians and the listeners. On Bye Bye Blackbird, Ella suddenly shouts “I’ve found me a good one” as if in recognition that she has hit upon one of these moments.
Some of the numbers on the album were well established features of Ella’s repertoire which she must have sung over and over again but there is never any sense that she is just going through the motions. Her rendition of Cole Porter’s Let’s Do It, for example, sounds as fresh as if she’s just discovered it. She attacks it full tilt giving short shrift to the sometimes complex lyrics, adding some of her own for good measure including topical references to the Beatles, the Animals, and Sonny and Cher as well as Richard and Elizabeth Burton, the Meghan and Harrys of their era. Again, older readers will recall…. Another animated music video has been made of her performance, complete with helpful sub-titles.
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The final track is Weill and Brecht’s Mack The Knife, another favourite in her repertoire ever since an iconic performance in Berlin in 1960 when she forgot the words (or did she?) and improvised to brilliant effect. Some of those improvisations became embedded in her regular performances of the number. But then appearing to improvise when you’re not is a key skill of any jazz musician. So, in the Oakland rendition of the song, we get the Louis Armstrong impersonation, the references to Bobby Darin, and the “Ella and her fellas” scat, embellishments that characterised so many of her other performances of Mack The Knife. But it still sounds fresh, it is still hugely enjoyable and it still wows the audience so it doesn’t matter, it really doesn’t matter. Here she is in Milan with Duke’s Orchestra in 1966 with a version of Mack The Knife very similar to Oakland’s:
So, why such a beautifully recorded performance by Ella Fitzgerald in the most dazzling form languished for so long in Norman Granz’s private collection is a bit of a mystery. One wonders if there are any other treasures lurking in his metaphorical attic… ?
The Moment Of Truth: Ella At The Coliseum with some informative sleeve notes by Will Friedwald was released in all formats on the Verve label on 28th February 2025 and is widely available (Amazon here). It is also available at a website devoted to Ella Fitzgerald (here) that has an on-line shop with details on all Ella’s recordings currently available.
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