Cole Porter was known to write withering letters to artists who got too creative with his songs; the same offense would send Richard Rodgers into high dudgeon. But Harold Arlens true loves were jazz and the blues, and he loved it when an artist of Ella Fitzgeralds stature got hold of his songs and took flight. The sixth volume of Ella's historic Song Book series was devoted to Arlen (1905-1986) a composer who wrote just as comfortably for the all-black revues at the Cotton Club as he did for The Wizard of Oz. This cantors son from Buffalo, born Hyman Arluck, spent seventeen years as a Hollywood songwriter, and even longer as a composer of Broadway scores (St. Louis Woman, House of Flowers, Bloomer Girl). But jazz was a lifelong magnet for Arlen, and it informed almost everything he wrote. As a youth hed watched ragtime blossom into Dixieland, and the rhythms tantalized him; meanwhile, his fathers singing whet a taste for improvisation in his son. Arlen quit high school to play ragtime piano in saloons; around 1924 he brought his own jazz band into Manhattan. Ella Fitzgerald recorded her two-LP tribute to Arlen in 1960. It came midway through a series that turned an esteemed singers singer into a household word. At a time when TV was only beginning to embrace black artists, there alongside Ed Sullivan, Dinah Shore and Jack Paar was Ella a finger-snapping, motherly songbird who, back in 1938, had swung her way into the countrys heart with A-Tisket, A-Tasket. Well after she reached middle age, her voice still had a bell-like purity and the insouciance of a child at play. She also had an ear that hardly any horn player could top. When bebop emerged in the mid-40s, Fitzgerald entered its top ranks, unleashing a fireworks display of scatted sixteenth notes and flatted fifths. For the Arlen Song Book, Granz saw the need for a freer approach. He brought in Billy May, a swing arranger who had worked for Glenn Miller and, more recently, had served as maestro on Frank Sinatras smash album, Come Fly with Me. Granz insisted that May leave room for Ella and some of the players to stretch out. Happily, one can hear, within the first-rate L.A. studio orchestra, the cool alto sax of Benny Carter and the piano of Lou Levy, one of Fitzgeralds best accompanists. Years later, May admitted that, like other busy arrangers of his day, he had hired ghostwriters to do at least some of the charts. But Mays brand of mellow swing must have been easy to mimic, because every track bears his stamp. Arlen wrote "Blues In The Night" for a film of the same name in 1941; the lyricist was Johnny Mercer, his collaborator, on and off, until 1959. "Blues In The Night" is the only true twelve-bar blues Arlen ever wrote. In this epic version, Fitzgerald and the orchestra evoke a countryside whose every road holds nothing but disillusion. Some of Arlens darkest torch songs notably "Stormy Weather" and "One For My Baby" are here too. Ballads of that type were thought to be all wrong for the sunny-voiced Ella. But she found her own way with them; as sung here, those wrist-slashers sound like youthful expressions of a first broken heart. Ella was never happier, of course, than when she was sailing on top of a swinging groove; in "That Old Black Magic" and "Ac-cent-tchu-ate The Positive" her joy sounds uncontainable. By comparison, Over The Rainbow brought out this great singers well-known insecurity: in her mind, she could never top Judy Garland. But even if Garlands pathos was out of her reach, Ellas wistfulness touches the heart. Billy May recalled Ella as always very sweet and cooperative, in the studio. Arlen had much more to say: She stands alone while almost everyone else is derivative. Her voice, her style, are pure unadulterated American, her phrasing impeccable she improvises playfully and with more fluidity than most instrumentalists. Rarely would he get a lovelier salute than when the First Lady of Song smiled upon him in this album.