Here’s a little taste of my next “Sightings” column, which appears biweekly in the “Pursuits” section of the Saturday Wall Street Journal:
After Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday, the two most widely admired singers in the history of jazz are Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. They were officially canonized by inclusion in “The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz” along with Armstrong, Holiday and Bessie Smith, the only vocalists to be so honored. Their recordings, Fitzgerald’s in particular, continue to this day to be sliced, diced, repackaged and reissued in box sets and best-of-the-best compilations. To publicly suggest that they might have been less than perfect is thus to pin a bull’s-eye on your chest–but I don’t much enjoy listening to either one of them, and never have.
In saying so, I know I’m going up against a wealth of highly credentialed contrary opinion….
As always, there’s lots more where that came from. See for yourself–buy a copy of tomorrow’s Journal and look me up.