25th April 2017 is the 100th anniversary of the birth of the legendary singer Ella Fitzgerald. Friday Night Is Music Night presents a special tribute at the Hackney Empire on Tuesday 11th April. Starring Clare Teal, Mica Paris, Louise Marshall and Emma Kershaw.
Amazingly, Ella Fitzgerald started out wanting to be a dancer – she had no ambitions to sing at all. Having entered a talent competition to dance, she panicked when she saw some of the other competitors and decided to sing instead. Good decision. Ella won the contest – and so history was made.
This concert will cover her story from her earliest beginnings through working with band leader Chick Webb in Harlem, to being introduced to the great producer Norman Granz (who established the Verve label – later Universal Jazz) and her extraordinary project with Granz to record the Songbooks series – featuring the best of Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, The Gershwins, Harold Arlen and Duke Ellington - each of which became a recording classic. These outstanding songs and arrangements by the likes of Nelson Riddle, Duke Ellington, Billy May, Paul Weston and Buddy Bregman will feature in the concert along with music from her later collaborations with Oscar Peterson and Louis Armstrong.
The 60 piece Â鶹ԼÅÄ Concert orchestra, conducted by Richard Balcombe, will play these luscious arrangements along with new charts of Ella classics by the country’s leading jazz arranger for orchestra and big band, Guy Barker.
