Mark Chilla

This week on the show, I’ll be exploring the theme of color in the Great American Songbook. Whether you are red with passion, green with envy, or feelin’ kind of blue, colors have a way of highlighting a phrase or providing different shades of meaning. Naturally, the Great American Songbook is bursting with color, providing warmth, tone, and vibrancy to a musical phrase.

This week on the show, I’m keeping things light and easy with a show all about happiness in popular song. I’m not simply looking at songs that can be construed as “happy,” but songs where being happy (or trying to become happy) is the actual theme. Most major songwriters from the Great American Songbook wrote songs about this, including Richard Rodgers, Harold Arlen, and Jule Styne. We’ll hear those songs and more this hour, sung by Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, and Nat King Cole.

The great jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald was a lot of things: iconic swing vocalist and bandleader, pioneering bebop scat singer, and elegant song interpreter. I've discussed many time on the show before, including a close look at her early work for Decca Records and her later work on Verve Records. But on this program, I’m going to feature a different aspect of her career: as one of the most renowned live performers in jazz.