That incident on Lake City Way - what an astounding tragedy. I wish I were in town. I'd go put flowers at the scene of the accident for the two wonderful young people that were murdered. Someone go do that, please?

I'm going to enjoy watching Assad's corpse dragged through the streets of Damascus.

Apparently the Tacoma sandwich robber is a Murakami fan, too...

I once told people on Slog that I saw Ella at the Nob Hill in San Francisco. Sorry, I meant The Fairmont. And she was freaking awesome.

Obviously it's great whenever pet adoption from rescues is promoted (it's hard to see where those animals in the Everett paper are actually located), but boy I wish you guys would promote our own municipal shelter once in a while (Seattle Animal Shelter). They have great animals and often have promotions for adoptions. Soon they'll have their Home for the Holidays push. They are a fantastic resource and we're lucky to have them.

"An Elderly Woman, a Pregnant Woman, and a Priest"

We're they part of the traffic blocking? If so then they perfectly deserved it. Free speech does not extent to things like that anymore than it extends to me yelling loudly on a bus or demanding I can camp on train tracks.

There are ways to express yourself without being a dick to everyone else.

Ella won a Grammy for being one of the most talented singers of modern music. Lyrics don't matter worth shit. Listen to the nearly 7-minute "How High the Moon" from the same Berlin performance, which is mostly scatting, and tell me lyrics matter.

Oh wait, someone already made my point and then some: "During her Scat solo on "How High the Moon", Fitzgerald quotes the Charlie Parker composition "Ornithology", which is in fact based on the chord changes for "How High the Moon", as a springboard for her own scat improvisation. This recording of "How High the Moon" is considered one of Fitzgerald's best scat solos, if not one of the best in jazz, along with Betty Carter's "Sounds (Movin' On)."

If you're a pregnant woman putting yourself in the protests, shame on you. Violence and pepper spray shouldn't happen, but lets face it. It's gonna.

As for the elderly lady, while her efforts are noble, she went hoping to get pepper sprayed as a means of bringing attention to her cause. I applaud her, but I don't feel sorry for her.

All priests should be pepper sprayed anyway...Okay, not all of them.

Why are you giving kudos to the PI for the Occupy reporting when the reporting clearly came from KOMO?

"Daniel Ray Habeeb, the driver of the SUV, was listed in satisfactory condition at Seattle's Harborview Medical Center early Tuesday."

In this context I'm going to assume "satisfactory condition" means "terrible pain and we're not giving him meds."

Maybe if we weren't wasting so much tax money on tunnels the traffic wouldn't be so bad that a few protestors could easily disrupt it ...

@10 That's the S.O.P. @ Harborview.

@12- They gave me a bunch of morphine while I was in there with a broken face. I left with a big bottle o' vicaden, which I soon discovered is no morphine.

This has long been my favorite Ella Fitzgerald performance. I love is so much when she forgets the words and starts making things up. It epitomizes everything that she stood for in American jazz, the celebratory foibles of the human condition sung w/ grace and good humor. Frank Sinatra one said that you could hear her breathing too much in her singing. He didn't like it. It's because her singing was organically an expression of her magnificent spirit and that's why I love her so.

Ella Forever.

@7, that's because she was one of the original boppers, a credential that often gets overlooked in appreciations of her songbook stylings. That was merely the third or fourth of her nine lives as a singer. Scat was only a small part of her arsenal; she was one of the great interpreters of lyrics too, though she rarely made them personal, more like launching pads for that unbelievable tone of hers. Listen to what she did not just to "How High The Moon" but also "The Nearness of You" with Louis, "I Won't Dance" with Nelson Riddle, "They Can't Take That Away From Me" off the Gershwin Songbook... so many great examples. Even relatively trite songs like "Dream a Little Dream Of Me" or "Moonlight in Vermont" soar when she gets ahold of the melody. Great jazz singer but a great, great ballad singer as well. So much love coming out of that big, ungainly woman, even in her later years.

Ella was not just the greatest female singer but the greatest singer who ever lived, period. Only Louis and Sinatra come close. I think she was the greatest American woman who ever lived, personally. Maybe Dolly Parton is her nearest competition. The fact that she came literally off the streets, homeless and barefoot in Harlem, a girl who stank when she first performed at the Apollo because she didn't have anyplace to wash, is just incredible.

@4, I am insanely jealous.

@4, what a wonderful experience to treasure. A sweet and honest Minnesotan gay I used to know told me as a teen in the 80s he decided one summer to drive across the country to see if he could find Ella's Beverly Hills house just to ring the doorbell and see what happened.

She had him in to tea, gave him her number and said he should look her up if he was ever in town again. A couple years later he found himself in LA and rang her up. She had him over for lunch.

@14, where did he say that? Sinatra idolized Ella.

@17, it was 1965 in a piece he wrote for Life. He dinged Judy Garland too.

http://books.google.com/books?id=S1MEAAA…

@18, in which he also says "of course Ella is my all-time favorite". I think he's just indulging in a little ring-a-ding-ding lesson from the master bloviating. Talk about how someone can "break all the rules" and still be great is pretty standard-issue stuff.

He also dings Sarah Vaughan -- "isn't too commercial" -- but then says "Sassy is so good now that when I listen to her I want to cut my wrists with a dull razor".

@19, I'm sure you're right, and I'm positive the "he didn't like it" M. Wells wrote at 14 referred to Sinatra's writing about her breath use, not about her singing as such.

@20, well, Frank likes what Frank does, right? And so do you if you know what's good for you, right? Breath control and phrasing were what Frank did better than anyone, but even in some of his greatest moments he could be a little forced, a little aggressive, a little bit of beating the song to death, whereas with Ella the song just poured out like liquid gold. Sinatra pushed those songs out; Ella just opened her mouth and they flew away on their own. Quite different approaches.

I saw Oscar Petterson at the Fairmont, too. My seat was so that I could watch the reflection of his fingers at the keys. But for scat, it was Betty Carter. I saw her at The Great American Music Hall. I enjoyed Ella for the sweetness of her sound. It was like the sweetness of a virgin. Pure, smooth and hypnotic in it's beauty.

I've been lucky enough to see Betty Carter, Abbey Lincoln and Cassandra Wilson but I will always regret not seeing Shirley Horn there before she died.

Fnarf, I don't recall where I read that catty frank Sinatra remark but you are right he also said that he loved her to pieces. And I totally agree. She will always be The Great American Singer (Frank ranks #2 in my book). Her Melancholy Baby from 1936 is the song that I would like played at my funeral. Well, that or her rockin version of Ding Dong the Witch is Dead. Her Drop Me Off in Harlem w/ Duke Ellington makes me weep with joy.

What fun! Slog talk on jazz singers! Who'd a thought it?