This Christmas might just be Ella Fitzgerald’s Christmas for you and yours. The world-renowned jazz singer’s second Christmas album will be reissued this season in time for all your holiday festivities.
Originally released in 1967, Ella Fitzgerald’s Christmas was Fitzgerald’s second holiday LP, as well as her second full-length for Capitol Records. The album represented a pivot from her first foray into Christmas music, 1960’s Verve release Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas, which found her putting a jazzy spin on secular seasonal favorites like “Jingle Bells,” “Sleigh Ride,” and “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.”
This time, teaming with producer Dave Dexter Jr., conductor Ralph Carmichael, and arrangers Robert Black and Grace Price, she zeroed in on the sacred. With arrangements ranging from smaller instrumental chamber groups to full choral support, she recorded 13 religious standards. Or, to put it another way, this is a record of Ella Fitzgerald singing timeless classics, most of them—such as “Silent Night,” “O Holy Night,” and “Joy To the World”—are well known even to those who’ve never picked up a hymnal. The sessions took place over two days in the summer of 1967; it was literally a case of Christmas in July.
More than half a century later, the album holds up as one of the all-time Christmas classics. “Ella Fitzgerald’s Christmas is a rarity among rarities in that it is a holiday album that actually holds up as a mature artistic statement,” raved All Music Guide in a review that concluded by calling it “one of the best Christmas albums ever made.”
Fitzgerald, whose nicknames included “Queen of Jazz” and “First Lady of Song,” was one of the greatest jazz vocalists of the 20th century. Her legacy as both a musical artist and a civil rights activist is extensive, and Ella Fitzgerald’s Christmas was one of her finest chapters.
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