Music: Pop Records

One of the 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.

The 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 it a fresh emotional gloss.

In the 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.’ “

Other new pop records:

Ole Buttermilk Sky, Hoagy Carmichael (Kapp LP). Even in his rare lyric moments, Singer-Composer Carmichael sounds like a man warbling in a tin shed. In this selection of his songs, mostly from the ’40s and ’50s, his virtues are manic enthusiasm, an antic rhythmic sense and an endlessly absorbing hobnail accent: “You cain if you tray-a-y/ . . . Ole buttermilk ska-a-y!”

Sweet Sue Evans (Dot LP). Songstress Evans, a onetime philosophy student, runs through a collection of pretty numbers in a pale but pretty voice, occasionally accompanying herself on a lightly swinging harp. Sample saw from her pseudo-philosophical kit: “Nothing is forever, always is a lie/ I can only love you, ’til the day I die.”

Belafonte Sings the Blues (Victor LP). In his first recorded excursion into the music “with which I have the strongest identification,” Singer Belafonte movingly re-creates the bawdy humor, the gin and jailhouse misery of the men and women who created the blues.

My Heart Sings, Polly Bergen (Columbia LP). Songstress Bergen’s idea of emotion is a throaty quaver and a kind of asthmatic gasp. The effect is disconcertingly in evidence on the first side of the album, but side 2 makes up the balance with a finely swinging Lucky Day, a bubbly The Lady Is a Tramp.

Ramsey Lewis and His Gentlemen of Swing: Ramsey Lewis, piano; El Young, bass; Isaac Holt, drums (Argo LP). A lightly swinging trio brushes over some standards—Carmen, I’ll Remember April —with a pleasantly antic air. Drummer Holt cuts his figures as fine and fancy as a man on a trampolin.