Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Songbook

Having both refocused her career and launched the Verve label with previous, highly successful recordings from the Cole Porter and Rodgers & Hart catalogs, the singer’s 1957 Duke Ellington-focused follow-up allowed Ella Fitzgerald to both retrench herself firmly as a jazz singer and cement an association with Ellington that yielded fruitful performances for years to come. It’s also the only anthology in the singer’s sprawling Songbook cycle that allows her to collaborate with the composer she’s honoring, a gambit that inspired Ellington and partner Billie Strayhorn to compose the sprawling “Portrait of Ella” concerto for the sessions, as well as the more playful “E and D Blues.” Ella’s jazz instincts rise admirably to the occasion, whether limbering up her incomparable scat-singing chops on “Rockin’ in Rhythm” and some of the other big band sessions that bookend the set, or galloping through “It Don’t Mean a Thing” and setting a torch to “Mood Indigo” on the middle third’s small ensemble dates, recordings that also feature the distinctive tenor sax of Ben Webster. The collection also scored a 1959 Grammy for Best Individual Jazz Performance.