Ella Fitzgerald - Ella At Juan-Les Pins (1964)

Ella at Juan-les-Pins is a 1964 live album by Ella Fitzgerald, accompianed by a quartet led by Roy Eldridge on trumpet with the pianist Tommy Flanagan, Gus Johnson on drums and Bill Yancey on bass. Val Valentin was the recording engineer, Cover photo by Jean-Pierre Leloir. The original 1964 album featured 12 songs, highlights of two concerts Fitzgerald performed on the 28 and 29 of July 1964 at the Fifth 'Festival Mondial du Jazz Antibes' in Juan-les-Pins, France. Ella is in fine voice, sounding very aggressive at times, as her voice leaps and growls. The listener also gets to hear Ella improvise a musical tribute to the crickets who are also in fine voice throughout the performance. It is

one of the forgotten live LPs from the career of vocal jazz's most impressive live artists.

Ella Fitzgerald does give the appreciative crowd the show they're looking for; whereas most vocalists have treated songs like "Them There Eyes" and "Perdido" as features for their playful side, Fitzgerald simply rips them apart with twisting, turning wordplay, breakneck tempos the band can hardly keep up with, and scats no listener can digest the first or second time through. She wrings all the selfish joi de vivre from "The Lady Is a Tramp" (addressing herself), then, with barely a pause, moves into a carefully paced "Summertime." Two recent crossovers, Barbra Streisand's "People" and the Beatles' "Can't Buy Me Love," serve as pleasant stopgap items between the real show, and Fitzgerald reprises her legend-making rendition of "Mack the Knife" from "Ella in Berlin", describing the entire sorted Brecht-to-Darin-to-Armstrong history of the song while never losing her sense of swing. Throughout, she never fails to energize or charm her audience.  

Ella Fitzgerald - Ella At Juan-Les Pins (1964)  
(256 kbps, cover art included)