Blue Moon. Ella Fitzgerald. 1956. Verve.

 Ella Fitzgerald’s Songbooks series is comparable to an extensive travelogue across the United States’ romantic fantasy of itself. The music, of course, dazzles; taken as a whole, the abundance of creative achievement stuns the imagination. Analogous to the beauty of refined intellectual articulation, the clarity of Fitzgerald’s singing voice flawlessly restates the collective jumble of emotions unloosed by American modernity’s most complex cultural imperatives by a process of distillation and reassembly that we typically associate with the subconscious and dreams. Delicacy and humor were the stardust of her art, and under its spell it’s possible to reassess such failures of the imagination as our tendency to collapse beneath the stress of heartbreak. Unlike her closest musical peers, Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra, whose best work challenges us into new, pioneering modes of endurance as they effortlessly practice contortions of emotional duress, Fitzgerald’s is the art of charm and tasteful elan, always slyly distancing herself from pain’s and sadness’s perplexities with elegant disavowal. Rodgers’ and Hart’s Blue Moon confronts the romance of desire as a physical privation resonant with nature. Fitzgerald takes the role of seducer, the sublime quality of her voice rhyming with arranger Buddy Bregman’s low tempo strings like a  twilight breeze cooly endorsing a lovers’ first time kiss. Romance is the failure of reality to properly propagate itself, and in a Fitzgerald ballad reality is altogether banished from the human purview. There is no other pop artist from that century or ours whose work disengages itself from the real world among whose inhabitants’ behavior her art itself is based. To escape into the artistry of Fitzgerald’s Blue Moon is to embrace the ghost our personal fancy has willed into existence, and which harangues your intelligence to be done with responsibility and duty until the moon is indeed at long last gold.