By FRED KAPLAN

With all the jazz boxed sets that have come out in recent years - the complete Miles Davis on Columbia, the complete Charlie Parker on Savoy, the complete Duke Ellington on RCA and so on - it’s hard to believe any significant tapes by any major musician might still be languishing undiscovered in a record company’s archives.

Yet Verve has just released “Twelve Nights in Hollywood,” a four-CD set of Ella Fitzgerald singing 76 songs at the Crescendo, a small jazz club in Los Angeles, in 1961 and ‘62 - and none of it has ever been released until now.

These aren’t bootlegs; the CDs were mastered from the original tapes, which were produced by Norman Granz, Verve’s founder and Fitzgerald’s longtime manager.

They capture the singer in her peak years and at top form: more relaxed, swinging and adventurous, across a wider span of rhythms and moods, than on the dozens of albums that were released in her lifetime.

Richard Seidel, the producer of the boxed set, first heard the tapes early this year. He was driving to Massachusetts from his home in New Jersey and brought along some rough CD transfers to play in the car.

“I was feeling kind of down that day,” he recalled, “and the more I listened, I could not help but start to smile. I’ve worked on dozens of Ella projects over the years, but there was something different about this one - the sheer rhythmic joy she projects, the endlessly inventive improvising.”

There’s nothing rare about a joyous Ella Fitzgerald recording; the woman exuded joy in nearly every note she sang. Yet the level on these sessions soared higher and plumbed deeper.

Gary Giddins, the veteran critic and author of “Jazz,” agrees. “This ranks on the top shelf of her live recordings,” he said. “It’s about as good as it gets.”

The 1961 Crescendo gig, from May 11-21 (followed by a repeat visit the next year), was booked as an afterthought, a time filler between a European tour that Fitzgerald and her quartet had begun in February and a monthlong stay at the Basin Street East in New York in June. Mr. Granz took the unusual step of taping every set. But in the next year alone he and Fitzgerald recorded six studio albums, including two of her eight heavily promoted songbook albums, each devoted to standards by a prominent American composer. In this context it’s not so surprising that the Crescendo tapes received short shrift.

Mr. Granz did choose 12 tracks from the roughly 14 hours of material recorded at the Crescendo and released them as an LP called “Ella in Hollywood.” But the album didn’t do well, perhaps because it sounded so strange. In between the songs, for reasons now unknown, someone spliced in loud applause that had been recorded in a large concert hall, making the whole album seem artificial. (The Crescendo was a nightclub of 200 seats.)

Whatever the reasons for the flat reviews and scant sales, the executives of Verve - which Mr. Granz had sold to MGM in 1960 - put the Crescendo tapes in the vault, where they were forgotten for years.

In 2008, Mr. Seidel, who had been the head of Verve from 1982 to 2002, signing nearly all its jazz artists and producing most of their albums, met with the label’s general manager, Nate Herr, and proposed taking a listen to the tapes with an eye toward releasing them. He knew it was a long shot. But Mr. Herr was game.

A few months later the company’s engineers sent Mr. Seidel CD copies of the tapes. He set out on his trip to Massachusetts, listening as he drove, and he realized he simply had to get the music released. “There was an intimacy and poignance about them,” he recalled thinking about the tapes, “that seemed to be brought out by the atmosphere of a small club.”

Remarkably, with the exception of “Ella in Hollywood” and “Live at Mr. Kelly’s,” a 1958 Chicago date (which wasn’t released until 2007), there are no Fitzgerald albums recorded live in a small club.

“Twelve Nights in Hollywood” is not a complete document (if it were, it would consist of more than a dozen CDs, not four). But it does include what Mr. Seidel regards as the best version of nearly every song - 76 out of 83 - that Fitzgerald sang on those nights.


The jazz legend at
her peak, in a relaxed
and intimate mood.


The blues were never Fitzgerald’s strong point; her few attempts at singing them in the studio came off as lame because it was hard to believe she had the capacity to be sad. But on these recordings she sings several blues songs, most notably “St. Louis Blues,” and, while no one would mistake her for Billie Holiday, she takes them for a bumpy, saucy ride.

When she scats on these recordings, she goes higher, lower, faster, more syncopated and more harmonically complex than usual; it sounds like a really good bebop horn solo, not an affectation, as her scatting on studio albums sometimes does.

And on ballads, she takes the melody in more - and more inventive - directions while still making it at least as heartbreaking as she ever did in a studio or large concert hall. The photographer Herman Leonard once took a picture of Duke Ellington sitting at a front-row table in a small New York nightclub, beaming at Fitzgerald while she sang. More than any other album, “Twelve Nights in Hollywood” gives us an idea of what Ellington was smiling at.


Ella Fitzgerald singing in Chicago in 1958. A new CD box set captures her as rarely heard, in a small nightclub setting. / YALE JOEL/LIFE MAGAZINE/TIME & LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES