New Ella, If You Can Find It
Have you read about the newly discovered and newly released Ella Fitzgerald Boxed Set from 1961 and 1962? It’s called Twelve Nights in Hollywood and it features 76 songs recorded at the Crescendo in Los Angeles. I read the article in The New York Times on Sunday and was pretty excited and I was a little down today and I figured, well, what could be better on a down day than Ella. There are plenty of places that sell CDs near where I live — I’m in the New York metropolitan area, so really, they’re all over the place, or at least they used to be. And it’s Christmas shopping season, so every place should be fully stocked, right? Well, so far I’ve called six different stores and not a single one is carrying this item. Zero. They all told me to go online and I could get free shipping. So why bother having a retail store at all?
I read the article in the Times about the release of Ella’s twelve nights in Hollywood this past Sunday, and went right out to HMV that afternoon to pick it up as well… Sadly they didn’t have it either. I ended up walking out of there with the Sinatra New York Box Set to ease the pain !!!
I checked into it a bit and it was released on November 10th, 2009 apparently… Sadly even the on-line stores don’t have it in stock yet either. Barnes & Noble said the should have it in by Wednesday December 9th. Portions of the box were originally released on Verve Records in 1961, as ELLA IN HOLLYWOOD…
…This one will definitely ease tensions of holiday shopping !
I miss the days of just wandering into the neighborhood record shop (or to a lesser extent, a well stocked Sam’ or HMV…) There’s that initial thrill you get, that sense of anticipation that perhaps once you pass through the doors you might just stumble upon a previously unreleased live session or a great re-issue with bonus tracks that our well-meaning “big brother” at Amazon may not have tipped us off about already based on their recommendations for us. There is also something to be said about the thrill of the hunt , a quest that might even lead to an unexpected find. Maybe that’s why many of us here in the “Jazz Collective” have chosen to distance ourselves a bit from the big on-line retailers in order to venture back to something that is a bit more tangible and rare than the unlimited 24-7 availability of digital mass media, to a format that still retains the essence of the golden age, and provides a nostalgic connection to that moment in time.
I went to one of the local stores yesterday to see if perhaps the Ella set had come in. I asked the clerk about it. He said they probably didn’t stock it because there was no market for it. I was the only one that had come in and asked about it, he told me. In the same store there were dozens of copies of the CD by Susan Boyle, who, apparently, has the hottest selling CD in the world right now. Says a lot about our culture, doesn’t it?