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From album
Ella and Louis
Ella Fitzgerald · 1956 · Track 11
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The story behind
In 1932, Vernon Duke and Yip Harburg crafted April in Paris, a song originally written for the Broadway musical Walk a Little Faster. The lyrics, with their clever wordplay between the city and the season, captivate from the first note: they promise a dreamlike Paris where "love is young and spring is eternal." Yet it wasn’t the original version by Freddy Martin in 1933 that endured in collective memory, but rather Count Basie’s rendition in 1955. There, the song became a jazz standard with an unexpected twist: Thad Jones improvised his famous solo over the tune of Pop Goes the Weasel, and Benny Powell gave it a distinct flair with his trombone bridge. The magic lies in how Basie carries it: he asks to repeat the *shout chorus* twice, as if the audience couldn’t get it out of their heads.
The 1955 recording was no mere recording: years later, it entered the Grammy Hall of Fame, and its influence extended to cinema. In 1974, the Count Basie Orchestra performed it in Blazing Saddles, as a nod to its legacy. But where April in Paris found its definitive voice was in the album Ella and Louis, recorded in August 1956 at Capitol Studios in Hollywood. Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong interpreted it as a dialogue between two legends: she, with her vocal precision that defies scat singing, and he, with his warm phrasing that seems to tell a story. The song’s length—6:33—leaves room for both to play, for Oscar Peterson’s piano and the Count Basie Orchestra’s rhythm to envelop them. It’s not just a song about Paris: it’s a Paris that sounds like jazz, like laughter, and like notes stretching like the smoke of a café on the banks of the Seine.