Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas with Vanessa Williams (Nouveau Productions, American "Pops" Orchestra, PBS, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I watched two Christmas specials on KPBS, of which the first was a quite engaging 60th anniversary tribute to the Ella Fitzgerald Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas album from 1960. It wasn’t billed as a 60th anniversary tribute, but since it was made in 2020 it obviously functioned as one. I first encountered Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas as a cassette I bought from the old Sam Goody’s location on the third floor of Horton Plaza before they moved to a bigger location on the first floor and then lamentably went out of business altogether in 2013. I burned a CD copy from my tape just as it was about to self-destruct and then got a CD version at Auntie Helen’s thrift store in North Park, though according to Wikipedia a later CD edition contained six bonus tracks, three of which were alternate takes. The original Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas album, produced by Norman Granz (Ella’s long-time manager and producer and almost certainly the best thing that ever happened to her career-wise besides Chick Webb, the Harlem drummer and bandleader who discovered her in the first place), wisely avoided sacred Christmas songs and focused exclusively on the secular side of Christmas music: “Jingle Bells,” “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” (a wistful ballad by Frank Loesser, who later said he’d never intended it to be a holiday song but it became one anyway). “Sleigh Ride,” the Mel Tormé-Bob Wells “The Christmas Song,” the Count Basie/-Eddie Durham-Jimmy Rushing “Good Morning, Blues” (which qualifies as a Christmas song because its lyrics reference Santa Claus), “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!,” “Winter Wonderland,” “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Frosty the Snowman” and “White Christmas.”

In 1967, during the “lost years” of Ella’s recording career after Granz left the record business in 1966 and before he returned to it in 1972, she made a second Christmas album for Capitol, Ella Fitzgerald’s Christmas, which was as terrible as Swinging Christmas had bewen great. The reason was that for some reason the folks at Capitol decided to have Ella record exclusively sacred Christmas songs, and her voice just wasn’t suited to that sort of material. (Sarah Vaughan made a stunning record of “City Called Heaven” and the Schobert “Ave Maria,” but Ella, great as she was, couldn’t pull off the kind of singing needed for songs like that to work.) The horrible arrangements by Ralph Carmichael – as opposed to the great ones Frank DeVol concocted for Swinging Christmas – didn’t help either. This 2020 tribute was staged by something called the American “Pops” Orchestra, based in Washington, D.C. and conducted by a young cutie named Luke Frazier, who said he formed the group to help preserve America’s heritage of classic songs from the 1920’s, 1930’s and 1940’s. I wasn’t aware this part of America’s musical heritage needed preserving; while the rock revolution of the 1960’s and 1970’s temporarily swamped this sort of music, it came back gradually in the 1980’s as Tony Bennett made a comeback and rock artists like Linda Ronstadt, Carly Simon, Rod Stewart and even Bob Dylan started recording standards. Country star Willie Nelson also made three albums of this kind of material, and they were among his best-sellers.

The show was hosted by Vanessa Willaims, and along with her it featured Dee Dee Bridgewater, Nova Peyton, Carmen Ruby Floyd, Morgan James, Norm Lewis (the one token male on the program) and Dave Detweiler (a trumpet player in the band who was featured instrumentally on “Frosty the Snowman”). I made the mistake of playing the original Ella Fitzgerald album before I watched the show, which made me a bit hyper-critical of the first few songs because the way the modern singers were interpreting this music didn’t reach Ella’s heights (though Dee Dee Bridgewater came closest; she is an acknowledged jazz singer, even though her shaved head makes her look more like a super-villainess in a Marvel Comics movie than a jazz singer). The songs were performed in the same order as on Ella’s original LP, with Bridgewater singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and “Sleigh Ride,” Peyton doing “Jingle Bells” and :Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” Floyd doing “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” and “White Christmas” (a bit disappointing as the closer, but then as far as I’m concerned – and pretty much the rest of the world agrees – Bing Crosby owns this song, now and forever), James doing “Winter Wonderland,” and Lewis,who seems to be going for “Black Tony Bennett” as his marketing niche, doing “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and “The Christmas Song.” Aside from Dave Detweiler’s trumpet feature on “Frosty the Snowman”(which I enjoyed except for the vocal interjections by a chorus, which I could have done without), the other songs – “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” and “Good Morning, Blues” – were sung by Vanessa Willliams herself. Though she’s usually one of those performers critics love to hate, she was great here, phrasing “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” perfectly and giving “Good Morning, Blues” the grit it needs. Next to Bridgewater, she was the best singer onthe show. I also liked the tweaks Frazier did to the original arrangements, especially the “hot” passages for ensemble violins.

The show also featured interstitial segments about Ella Fitzgerald herself, who survived a childhood as grim as her great contemporary Billie Holiday’s – rendered homeless when her mother died in 1932 after suffering sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather (he was a Portuguese immigrant fisherman and her only recorded comment about him came during her recording a tribute album to Brazilian singer-songwriter Antonio Carlis Jobim that required her to sing in Portuguese; she told Norman Granz that if she’d known someday she’d have to sing in Portuguese she’d have paid more attention when her stepfather tried to teach it to her). In 1934, while homeless, she entered an amateur night contest at Harlem’s famous Apollo Theatre and originally planned to dance, but after seeing the on-stage headliners do a spectacular dance number together, she realized she couldn’t compete with them and decided to sing instead. (By coincidence, Billie Holiday also showed up at her audition intending to dance, but bombed out as a dancer and, at the suggestion of teh rehearsal pianist, quickly shifted to singing.) She sang Hoagy Carmichael’s song “Judy,” which she had learned from the hit recording by The Boswell Sisters (Ella always named Connee Boswell as her biggest influence; ironically Boswell was a white singer whose voice sounded Black and Ella a Black singer whose voice sounded white), and when the crowd applauded her and asked her to sing something else, she sang the flip side of the Boswells’ record, “The Object of My Affection.”

In 1935 the noted Harlem bandleader and drummer Chick Webb hired her for his band – since she was still underage Webb and his wife adopted her – and within two years she was making hit records with Webb’s band. Her breakthrough came with “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” a nursery rhyme she and arranger Van Alexander adapted into a pop song; the record sold over a million copies and broke her into stardom. When Webb died the next year Ella at least nominally assumed leadership of his band – the first woman to front an otherwise all-make big band – though trumpeter Taft Jordan was the musical director and pretty much ran the show. After that Ella never looked back, and one reason for her long success was a protective management team that kept her from the traps of alcohol, drugs and men that led to Billie Holiday’s burnout and early death. One of Ella’s biographers discovered a previously unknown husband named Benny Kornegay, the sort of exploitative man who latched on to women with money and lived off them, which her managers got annulled and did such a good job covering up no one knew about it until this author discovered the original marriage license in the New York records. Ella’s second husband was jazz bassist Ray Brown; they broke up because of career conflicts but remained good friends and sometime collaborators. They adopted a son, Ray Brown, Jr.,,who wanted to follow his parents into the music business but didn’t make it because he wanted to be a country singer, at a time (before Charley Pride) when that wasn’t a career option for Blacks. Ella continued her successfil career until 1991, when her diabetes had progressed to the point where both her hegs had to be amputated; she retired after a concert at Carnegie Hall (her 26th appearance there) and died five years later – but her records, and tributes like this, keep her legacy alive.