Album Reviews

I picked up The Best of Laurie Volume 1 (LES-4003) at a garage sale the other week and it includes “He’s So Fine” by The Chiffons, “A Little Bit O’ Soul” by The Music Explosion, “A Little Bit of Soap” by the Jarmels and “Hushabye” by The Mystics, among other tunes.

On his eight or ninth album in little more than a decade, young Chicago native Andrew Bird continues on his smart way, singing, whistling and fiddling bemusedly but sincerely about life’s conditional conditions.

I was wrong. These four Frankenstein monsters created by Capitol in 1964 out of parts stripped from various UK originals sound fantastic and yes, revisiting them after decades of neglect and dismissal opened a floodgate of intense memories-for me my freshman year at Cornell- of my roommate at University Halls #3, of a dorm band fronted by a kid names Ozzie Ahlers, and their big hit “Master the Bate,” and especially where and when I bought each of these albums, and how I reacted upon hearing them. When I heard the fake stereo version of “I Feel Fine” for the first time in 3 plus decades I flashed on the first time I ever heard the song: on WKBW, Buffalo, which was a clear channel we could pick up on the AM radio at night in Ithaca. I remember who I was with when the song aired, what he was wearing and even how the dorm air smelled. Hearing these songs strung together in this order creates a totally different vibe than the one you get listening to the UK originals: more muscular, and justd plain more American. That's both the problem and the pleasure, however.

Time was, and not that long ago (well a decade or so ago), when you could easily find original pressings of this breezy addition to Ella's song book series, either as a double LP set or as two individual volumes. Fitzgerald was as much a popular singer as a jazz great, appearing often on popular venues like The Ed Sullivan Show, so her LP sales were brisk—especially the Verve songbooks. I found my original copies of these at a house in Hackensack, NJ fifteen years ago. What an Ella find that garage sale was! A real fan was jettisoning her LP collection and I was more than happy to oblige for a buck apiece.

This impeccably produced (by Norman Granz, who literall built Verve Records and later Pablo around her), career summing concert takes Ella from her beginnings with the Chick Webb Orchestra to her then current quartet featuring Tommy Flanagan, Keeter Betts, Joe Pass and Freddie Waits, all brilliantly choreographed by master showman/producer/record executive Norman Granz along with Newport producer George Wein.