Word: ellas
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...Ella Clark and Amanda Mackay-Smith rate notice for the size of their parts as the other two sisters, but not for their accomplishments. Miss Clark, particularly, shows nothing but the efforts of a young actress trying hard. Richard Smithies, in the part of a philosophic army officer, plays Richard Smithies. He does this very well by now, but the characterization is becoming tiresome. As for the other performers, except for Elizabeth Fox, who is just about nasty enough as a snobbish young wife, the kindest thing which can be said is that they would profit from further experience...
...basic articles of faith in the beard-and-sandal set is that no woman alive sings jazz like Ella Fitzgerald. Ella it was who schooled a whole generation of vocalists to phrase and improvise like jazzmen; Ella, too, who popularized scatted lyrics and the word rebop. But Ella has always moved with equal ease through the palm-frond world of popular dance music, and Jazz Impresario Norman Granz set out to prove it by issuing a series of albums on his own Verve label featuring Ella in great pop hits. Latest addition to the series: Ella singing Irving Berlin...
...album opens with that swinging exercise in cocktail-lounge stoicism, Let's Face the Music and Dance, and ends 31 songs later with a jumping I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm. En route Ella proves again that she is mistress of more moods than anybody else in the business. She bends her remarkably supple voice with sighing ease around tortuous, voice-trapping lyrics ("I want to peep through the deep, tangled wild wood/ Counting sheep 'til I sleep like a child would"). Best of all, she takes the faded material and gives...
...four years she has been working with Impresario Granz, Ella has tripled her income (to $300,000 a year) and moved out of the jazz cellars into such brassy clubs as Manhattan's Copacabana. Does that mean she plans to stick entirely to pop songs? Not at all, says Ella. "I sing like I feel. Sometimes some of the fellas say, 'What's the matter, Ella, you goin' square?' And I tell them, 'I'm not goin' square, I'm going versatile...
Partly because the market for good jazz singers-i.e., singers who phrase and improvise in the manner of instruments in a jazz band-is remarkably small, Ernestine has remained a critical success and a popular failure. She is inevitably compared to Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday. Ernestine invariably rejects the comparisons. "I wish," she says, "they would let me be just me." She is, and "just me" is plenty good enough...