Month: May 2024

Dead Or Alive: Youthquake  (1985)

As I rebuild my CD collection, I was looking for Ella's Best of the Love Songs disc, and while on Discogs I stumbled upon this 3-disk box set. It contained not only Best of the Love Songs, but also Best of the Songbooks and Best of the Ballads, both disks I'd also owned previously. Checking prices on the individual disks, it would've cost me around ten dollars a piece (including shipping) to replace them, but here was this collection for ten dollars for all three! In the interest of transparency, there were several copies offered by different sellers, all in the same price range, but this was the cheapest one listed as NM (near mint) condition.

This is a nice collection if you like a little Ella now and then, and as I said it can be picked up for just a few dollars. If you want a brand new copy, it's still available through Amazon for about $35.

On the other hand, If you want all the Ella The Complete Ella Fitzgerald Songbooks 16-disc set, expect to lay out anywhere from $120-$450. (The latter being for a mint, never-opened copy.)

I certainly don't remember the circumstances of where or when I originally bought a lot of my music, but for some reason Best of the Love Songs stands out. I was meeting friends at Scottsdale Fashion Square back in 1998 to see Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss, but I arrived way too early and popped into a record store to kill some time. The disc caught my eye, and at the time just starting to get into classic jazz, I decided to take it home.

In one of those kismet moments that's forever burned into my memory, when I moved back to San Francisco later that year, I Remember You was playing as I crossed the Bay Bridge back into the City.