courtesy of Play MPE
In 1993 Verve released the CD The Complete Ella in Berlin: Mack the Knife, originally recorded at Ella Fitzgerald’s concert in the Deutschlandhalle in Berlin on February 13, 1960. This recording was called “complete” because it added four “bonus tracks” to the nine tracks on the LP album Ella in Berlin: Mack the Knife, which Verve had released in 1960. What is less known, particularly among collectors of recordings, is that Fitzgerald returned to Berlin in 1962, giving a concert at the Berlin Sportpalast on March 25, 1962, performing only with the trio of Paul Smith on piano, Wilfred Middlebrooks on bass, and Stan Levey on drums.
This concert was also recorded, curiously in both monaural and stereophonic versions. However, it appears that Verve never knew about these tapes; so they languished in obscurity. Fortunately, a copy of them eventually found its way to the Verve studios; and they were released this past summer as a new Fitzgerald album entitled Ella: The Lost Berlin Tapes.
I must confess that the Fitzgerald discography is so massive that I have never tried to keep up with it. As a result, her primary presence in my collection is the four-CD Pablo release The Concert Years, which covers an impressive range of performances that took place between 1953 and 1983. While the geographic scope of that album is impressive, it did not include any appearances in Berlin. So I let my curiosity get the better of me; and this is definitely an engaging collection of familiar selections (including a return to “Mack the Knife” without the memory lapse that became a highlight of the 1960 album).
I suspect that I shall be making return visits to this new release as I have made repeat visits to my Pablo collection in the past.
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