We just celebrated Tony Bennett’s 100th birthday on August 3 with a show in NYC at Joe’s Pub. He inspired so many artists (over the course of one afternoon, he set me on my path to music — you can hear me tell that story here). It was an epic night (duet with Kat Edmonson!) that ended with Tony’s son Dae telling me some of his dad’s favorite swear words. So fair warning, this edition of 10 things contains a lot of Tony Bennett! Let’s go!

1. In the lead-up to the Tony Bennett show, I rabbit-holed the 12 tunes on the setlist and shared their backstories in Tony Bennett at 100: A Life in 12 Songs. Did you know “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” almost never got heard? The songwriters (George Cory and Douglass Cross) ran into Bennett MD Ralph Sharon on the street and gave him the sheet music… and Sharon stuck it in a drawer for ten years. TEN. Blows my mind. So often, the iconic status of a piece of art hinges on so little, such absolute serendipity.

2. New to me: This clip of Duke Ellington accompanying Ella Fitzgerald on the Ed Sullivan Show, March 1965. I’d never seen footage of them performing together. Continued proof that while recorded Ella is great, live Ella confirms the existence of some sort of God, who loves music. Is it just me (it’s not) or is the sexual tension at 11 here? I know will-they-or-won’t-they energy when I see it. (All that, and you never even see Duke’s face.) “Do Nothing ‘Til You Hear From Me,” music by Duke Ellington, lyrics by Bob Russell (who also worded “Crazy He Calls Me” and “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”).

   

3. I sat down with digital storyteller Sophia Aste to talk about my experience interviewing Tony Bennett. One of my favorite nuggets of wisdom from the great man was his answer to the question, why do tunes in the Great American Songbook endure? By you, as the artist, bringing your authentic self to them. You bring your own story to the story of a song, and together you tell a new story.

   (You can see the whole video series on Instagram and YouTube.)

4. I made a Spotify playlist of 19 Tony Bennett tracks some of which you’ve (maybe) never heard that are absolute bangers: Tony Bennett: Lesser-Known Goodies.

5. I recently discovered Moon of Manakoora, a sweet little jewel of a record that won vocalist Janet Seidel the Bell Award for Best Australian Jazz Vocal Album (years ago, but new to me). I love her chamber-jazz arrangements of tunes like “No Moon At All” and “Deep Purple” (which no-one ever sings). Listen to Moon of Manakoora on Apple Music | Spotify | YouTube (Thanks to Kay Sharples for the tip — and please keep the music recommendations coming!)

6. RIP Bonnie Tyler. (This line from her Financial Times obit made me giggle). “Jesus, where’s the kitchen sink?” said singer Rody Dodd when he heard an early mix of the none-more-epic “Total Eclipse of the Heart” (he sang the “turn around” parts). Please (re)watch this version of the (bananas) “Total Eclipse” music video where the lyrics describe what we literally see. As a singer, I think often about how Tyler’s voice got that rasp only after she ignored her surgeon’s orders to rest after vocal-node surgery. Ever heard Bonnie Tyler’s crystal-clear before-voice?

7. As someone who’s put out seven records with the Hot Sardines (nine, if you count EPs), it’s funny to realize just how many of the people who follow you don’t know what you’re up to because they never see you in their feed. Result: Lots of people asking when the Sardines are putting a new album out. We just did! It’s pretty good! Listen to Good News on Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube. My favorite tracks (this week) are Love Potion No. 9 and Lover Come Back to Me.

8. Tony Bennett’s humanitarian side: A career spanning 70 albums is titanic, making beautiful music well into your 80s is inspiring, but vocally and consistently championing human and civil rights (when many other old-guard stars stayed quiet) is what made Bennett groundbreaking.

9. Tony Bennett on his mom (pictured below): “My mother, Anna Suraci Benedetto, sewed dresses. She worked in a factory by day and brought home dresses at night because she was paid by the piece and had to support my brother, my sister, and me. My father had died when I was ten. Every night, we’d meet my mother at the Ditmars Boulevard el train stop, the north terminal of the lines from Queens, when she returned from Manhattan and help her carry home a big bundle of unsewn dresses. We’d climb the stairs, and she’d start to sew as soon as she got home. She’d stop to make us dinner, and after that, while we kids read or listened to music, she would bend over her sewing machine again to continue stitching dresses.” From Bennett’s lovely memoir with Scott Simon, Just Getting Started.

10. I’m going on tour this month! The Hot Sardines bring Good News through the northeast U.S. late August, including the stage with maybe the best view in the world. (Shalin Liu in Rockport, MA.) Tickets via hotsardines.com.

In the next edition: The cover of my debut solo album, out October 16 (!).

Thanks so much for reading. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with a friend.

xox Elizabeth

_{I may earn a small commission on items purchased through this newsletter, at no extra cost to you, which goes towards keeping it free for all. I hope you love them as much as I do.}

I don’t think I’ve ever published a setlist ahead of a gig—tempting fate, seems like—but this one’s special, given the afternoon I spent with Tony Bennett that changed the course of my life. For Are You Having Any Fun: Elizabeth Bougerol Celebrates Tony Bennett at 100, Aug 3 in NYC, we narrowed down Tony’s 70 (!) or so albums to a dozen songs, easily one of the most fun/really difficult things I’ve ever attempted. Here’s a little backstory on each.

I Left My Heart in San Francisco — Written in the early ‘50s by songwriters George Cory and Douglass Cross, who’d moved from San Francisco to Brooklyn and wrote it out of homesickness. Bennett recorded it on January 23, 1962, arranged by Marty Manning, for the album of the same name. His pianist Ralph Sharon had actually forgotten about the song, stuck in a drawer (for about ten years, music historian Will Friedwald told me), until he rediscovered it before a 1961 tour stop in San Francisco, where a bartender in Hot Springs, Arkansas told them he’d buy the record if they ever cut it. It was originally the B-side to “Once Upon a Time” before Columbia flipped the single, and it won Bennett the 1963 Grammys for Record of the Year and Best Solo Vocal Performance.

Until I Met You — Released on the album I Wanna Be Around... in 1963. This tune started out as the instrumental “Corner Pocket,” written by Basie’s longtime rhythm guitarist Freddie Green, and first popularized on the band’s 1957 album April in Paris. It wasn’t until Donald Wolf set words to it that it became the vocal standard “Until I Met You,” which Sarah Vaughan sang first with the Basie band in 1961, before Bennett cut his own version the following year.

Love for Sale — Cole Porter wrote this for the 1930 Broadway revue The New Yorkers, where it was sung by a prostitute advertising her wares — scandalous enough that it was banned from radio play, and the show’s producers replaced the planned white lead with a Black singer to perform it. Bennett recorded it October 24, 1957, for The Beat of My Heart (an unusual, singular drum-fueled album), featuring guest percussionists Sabu and Candido giving it a Latin-percussion treatment. He’d return to the song 64 years later as the title track of his poignant final studio album, a 2021 Cole Porter tribute with Lady Gaga made after his Alzheimer’s diagnosis.

I Can’t Believe That You’re in Love With Me — A 1926 Jimmy McHugh/Clarence Gaskill standard. Bennett recorded it for his first true studio album, Cloud 7 (1955), a deliberate pivot from his his Italianate pop hit-parade singles toward a jazz-combo sound with guitarist Chuck Wayne’s group. Underscoring this shift? Cloud 7 didn’t even have Bennett on the cover — instead it’s one of those random-cute-girl-on-an-album-cover shots.

It Had to Be You — The 1924 Isham Jones/Gus Kahn chestnut (later immortalized in Casablanca and When Harry Met Sally). Bennett cut a studio version on March 24, 1964, with the Ralph Sharon Trio for the album When Lights Are Low. He revisited it three decades later on his celebrated 1994 MTV Unplugged album, which won two Grammys including Album of the Year.

I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face — From the 1956 Lerner & Loewe musical My Fair Lady, originally sung by Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins. Bennett recorded it with Count Basie and His Orchestra in 1959 for the album Basie/Bennett, arranged by Ralph Sharon — a big-band reworking of a wistful show tune.

Close Your Eyes — Written by Bernice Petkere, dubbed the “Queen of Tin Pan Alley” by Irving Berlin herself. Bennett recorded it in 1961, for the album My Heart Sings, arranged and conducted by Ralph Burns, with a band featuring Milt Hinton and Zoot Sims — he’d also cut an earlier version back in 1954-55.

The Very Thought of You — Ray Noble wrote and first recorded it in 1934 with Al Bowlly on vocals at Abbey Road, making it a US hit. Bennett’s most famous version came decades later: In March 2006 he recorded it as a duet with Paul McCartney for Duets: An American Classic, arranged by Jorge Calandrelli — fittingly, they tracked it at Abbey Road Studios, the same building where the original was cut 72 years earlier. But first place, for my money, is the version on 1966’s A Time for Love, where Bobby Hackett on cornet does a sort of response to Bennett’s call with each phrase. Arrangement by Johnny Keating, and nothing short of gorgeous.

The Best Is Yet to Come — Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh actually wrote this one for Bennett, not Sinatra (who later made it famous and, rumor has it, had it engraved on his original tombstone). Bennett recorded it in 1960 with Coleman himself arranging, releasing it as a single that year before folding it into 1962’s I Left My Heart in San Francisco. He also cut a live version at his historic June 1962 Carnegie Hall concert.

Are You Having Any Fun — Written by Jack Yellen and Sammy Fain and made popular in the 1939 Broadway revue George White’s Scandals (which I’d never heard of, either). Bennett recorded it for his 1959 album Strike Up the Band with Count Basie, then revisited it in 2006 as a duet with Elvis Costello for Duets: An American Classic.

Firefly — Cy Coleman again! He and Carolyn Leigh wrote this in 1958 as an audition song for the musical Gypsy. It didn’t make the cut for the show, but Bennett picked it up and took it to #20 on the Billboard Hot 100. He recorded it for 1959’s In Person! with Count Basie, and revived it again more than 55 years later on Cheek to Cheek with Lady Gaga in 2014.

It’s All Right with Me — Cole Porter wrote this for his 1953 musical Can-Can. Bennett recorded it as part of a sprawling Cole Porter medley on his 1975 album Life Is Beautiful/The Complete Improv Recordings cut for Improv Records — the independent label he and manager Bill Hassett founded after breaking from Columbia in frustration over being pushed toward rock material.

See you on Aug 3 for Are You Having Any Fun: Elizabeth Bougerol Celebrates Tony Bennett at 100, where I’ll be joined by Kat Edmonson, Geoff Burke, John Manzari, Emeline O’Rourke, Paul Brandenburg, Matt Ray, J. Walter Hawkes, Jen Hodge, Todd Londagin and David Berger. Tickets here.

xo Elizabeth

It’s a strange thing to realize that someone who feels so present in your life—in your record collection, in your memories, in the way you think about music—has now been gone long enough that we’re celebrating a centennial instead of a birthday. And yet somehow, Tony still feels very much here.

So on what would have been his 100th birthday, I’ll be at Joe’s Pub with my new band for a one-night-only show called Are You Havin’ Any Fun? (named after the song he recorded with the Count Basie Orchestra by Jack Yellen, Sammy Fain, and Jack Shilkret) – the first track on a forthcoming EP reimagining my favorite songs of his.

I love that title because, for Tony, it seemed to be more than a song. It was practically a philosophy. He believed that joy wasn’t the opposite of artistic rigor—it was part of it. Somewhere along the way, Are You Havin’ Any Fun? became a question I’ve started asking myself too.

We’ll be playing some of the songs that helped define him, like “Close Your Eyes,” “Until I Met You,” and “The Best Is Yet to Come.” I’m excited for you to hear all-new arrangements created with and by J. Walter Hawkes and with contributions from some extraordinary guest players. Kat Edmonson, Geoff Burke, Emeline O’Rourke, and John Manzari will be there alongside my band--MD J. Walter Hawkes, Matt Ray, Todd Londagin, Jen Hodge, David Berger--each of whom brings a completely unique voice to the evening.

Tony was the ultimate singular artist. He had a point of view. He had a mission. He knew exactly who he was and what he was meant to do. Through changing fashions, changing sounds, and an industry that repeatedly told artists to reinvent themselves to stay relevant, he somehow never lost his center. He simply kept making the music he believed in until the world caught back up with him. There’s something deeply comforting about that.

So where else for this than Joe’s Pub, whose mission is artist-driven? When I reached out to the Pub’s artistic director to ask if we could do a show celebrating Tony, I learned that he’d quietly funded an internship program for them where young people could learn the ropes in the arts. What a spectacular human.

It’s easy to mistake authenticity for branding these days, or originality for novelty. Tony reminds us that they’re not the same thing. Authenticity isn’t about trying to be different; it’s about refusing to be anyone else. That lesson has stayed with me far longer than any vocal trick or performance advice ever could.

I hope this evening feels less like a tribute concert and more like a conversation across generations—a celebration of songs that continue to live because they still have something to say.

If you’d like to celebrate Tony’s hundredth with us, we’d love to see you. Tickets are available here.

xo Elizabeth

Twenty-Five Years / Moanin’ Low

Debuted at The Paris Theater for Noir City NYC, in the The Listening Room is a 45 of two new recordings from my side project: One, an explosion of sound in the spirit of classic Elmer Bernstein soundtracks, and its opposite, a spare cover of a 1929 elegy of love and loneliness.

“Twenty-Five Years” is an original song I wrote as the theme for this year’s Noir City, Eddie Muller’s extraordinary festival celebrating classic film noir, now in its 27th year. I wanted to tell a very noir story of love, loyalty, and revenge while paying homage to some of my favorite moments in the genre’s jazz-soaked history. It was a joy to collaborate on the arrangements with J. Walter Hawkes (I gave him a very spare demo and shaped the process, but really, the instrumental arrangement is his baby) and to bring the song to life with such wonderful musicians.

Alongside it is “Moanin’ Low,” written by Ralph Rainger and Howard Dietz in 1929, forever associated in my mind with Claire Trevor’s unforgettable performance in Key Largo. It’s one of those songs that carries an entire world inside it. I wanted this to be incredibly spare, so we kept instrumentation to Jen Hodge’s bass, Matt Ray’s piano, and Walter’s trombone.

Putting these two recordings together felt like they belonged in conversation.

If you visit The Listening Room, you’ll find the stories behind both recordings, the full lyrics, and everyone who helped make them.

ENTER THE LISTENING ROOM

Thanks for stopping by. See you next at Joe’s Pub on August 3 to celebrate Tony Bennett’s 100th birthday.

xo,

Elizabeth

Hear this piece read by yours truly, below.

Back when I was writing about music for magazines—before I became a professional musician, before the band I co-founded snowballed into a career that’s taken me places I never dreamed of—I spent an afternoon with Tony Bennett, in his apartment overlooking Central Park, interviewing him about his new record.

Reading that back, it sounds so cool and collected. To be clear: I was neither. Aggressively, chaotically neither—a ball of pure adrenaline for days. I had pages of notes, more questions than I could possibly ask, and the kind of nervous energy that only comes from meeting someone whose music has lived alongside you for years. This was Tony Bennett. When I was 8 or 9, I was so obsessed with a record he’d made with Count Basie that I named my pet bird Peepers, after “Jeepers Creepers” (deep cut).

And I was going to talk to him. At his house. Where he lives.

When I first got to his apartment, I spent what probably seemed like a suspicious amount of time in his guest bathroom, just kind of gathering my wits and wondering if my 800-decibel heartbeat was audible to others.

And those were just This-is-Tony-Bennett nerves. What I didn’t know, when I settled in on one of the cream-colored couches in his living room, was that our conversation would bring me face to face with something about myself I hadn’t figured out yet.

I wrote about music, created content about music. I loved my job, and I think I was pretty good at it. I loved getting to pick the brains of the music makers, and telling the stories behind how records got made. That’s why I was sitting on Tony Bennett’s couch, after all.

But what he somehow sensed, over the course of my interviewing him, was that I didn’t just want to talk about music.

I wanted to make it.

I wanted to sing. (I had been singing since I was three, I just hadn’t done it much in front of other people.) I wanted to write songs. I wanted to arrange them. I heard music in my head from the moment I woke up until I fell asleep, and I’d spent years assuming that was simply true of anyone who loved music. I didn’t yet get what was going on inside my own head. Who in their early 20s does?

We finished the interview, but Tony Bennett wasn’t finished talking. “You seem to know a lot about this music,” he said.

I admitted I sang, all old jazz, mostly in the shower. I’d been in one high school musical and one community-theater production.1 Instead of ushering me out the door, he started asking me questions.

How long had I been singing?

Who were my favorite composers?

What kind of music did I hear myself making?

And the million-dollar question, the one that tapped a small crack in my foundation:

He grilled me, in the best possible way—better than any therapist before or since—not to test me, but because (I think?) he was genuinely interested. He had a generosity that made you feel like your dreams deserved serious consideration. For that afternoon, he treated my barely-spoken ambitions as though they were already real.

Looking back, I think he recognized something I hadn’t figured out: I was waiting for permission. I was waiting to feel qualified enough, confident enough, legitimate enough to call myself what I actually wanted to be. I had an endless list of reasons why people like me don’t become professional musicians, but deep down, I was terrified. How would one even do such a thing? Where do you begin?

Tony Bennett wasn’t interested in any of that. He didn’t say it directly, but his message was clear: Whether you believe you can do this or believe you can’t, you’re probably going to be right either way.

He had spent a lifetime around artists. He knew that talent matters, but he also knew how often the biggest obstacle is the voice in your own head telling you to stay safely on the sidelines.

And at a certain point he said:

I walked in hoping to get enough good quotes to turn into a 2500-word piece for a magazine,2 and I walked out having hit an almost indescribable jackpot: the feeling that one of my heroes had seen me—not as a writer who happened to love music, but as a musician who hadn’t yet given herself permission to become one.

Now that I’m older, I think of the generosity behind the wisdom he shared with me, a total stranger. I think of the questions he asked and hear the quiet certainty behind them. And I imagine what it must have been like to look across the couch from the relative end of your titanic career at someone with all their years ahead of them, but no idea where to start.

Stop waiting. Start singing.

Love is pure gold and time, a thief.

None of his wisdom hit right away, I’m afraid. It took a while until I started singing outside the shower. But I left his place that day and walked out onto Central Park feeling very, very unsettled, and that feeling lasted for weeks. I received an annual Christmas card from Tony for a few years, and with each card I felt a slight pang of guilt. He had given me a gift. When was I going to open it?

Now that I run two bands and have been making my living as a musician for more than a decade, I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve thought of his advice. What would Tony do? is a true filter for decisions—about everything from hiring personnel to choosing songs to issuing difficult criticism to mentoring those starting out.

I saw Tony Bennett perform live as many times as I could. The voice, sure—but it was his connection to the audience that was as deep and powerful as he made it seem effortless. At one show, he was telling a story when a woman a few rows from the stage yelled out a request: “I Wanna Be Around!”

There was a beat. And he replied:

“So do I, sweetheart. So do I.”

xo Elizabeth

p.s. Please join me, my band and special guests as we wish Tony Bennett a very happy 100th Birthday August 3 at Joe’s Pub.

p.p.s. Read more: Tony Bennett at 100: A Life in 12 Songs

In 1956, jazz might have decidedly begun moving on from the form and feel that defined Ella and Louis’ early careers — it was arguably the year Miles Davis became a thing and Chet Baker’s work helped define a West Coast sound, all while the airwaves thrummed with Elvis Presley’s debut record.

But Norman Granz, a jazz impresario known for his Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts and civil rights advocacy, managed Ella Fitzgerald and was aiming to elevate her above jazz circles into mainstream popularity. After powerlaunching his Verve label in spring 1956 with Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook (which sold 100,000 copies in its first month of release), he paired her with Louis Armstrong to create a duet album of American standards. Granz chose slow-to-moderate tempo ballads but apparently deferred to Armstrong for final song choices and keys.

The album was recorded in a single day on August 16, 1956, at Capitol Studios in Hollywood, right after a Hollywood Bowl concert. Backed by the absolute dream team that was the Oscar Peterson Quartet (Peterson on piano, Ray Brown on bass, Herb Ellis on guitar, Buddy Rich on drums), they cut 11 tracks including "Cheek to Cheek," "They Can't Take That Away from Me," and "Gee, Baby, Ain't I Good to You." The result is magic.

For further reading on how Norman Granz fought racial prejudice in jazz, I recommend Alexandra Piper’s piece Norman Granz: Revolutionizing jazz for social justice (Smithsonian, National Museum of American History).

Video transcript:

 The next time you think to yourself, oh man, I have such a busy week and I have a big presentation to give and I have no time to prepare for it, I want you to consider this. Today in 1956, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong went into the studio with zero rehearsal, zero preparation, and recorded Ella and Louis, basically defining the genre of the jazz ballad duet.

They didn’t know what songs they were going to be doing ahead of time. Norman Granz, who had started Verve Records, had the idea to put them together. So he booked studio time for the morning after a huge concert at the Hollywood Bowl with Art Tatum, and Oscar Peterson, and all these big names, that would eventually become the album Live at the Hollywood Bowl.

He booked studio time for the next morning so that Ella and Louis could go in and record these songs. They set all of the songs in Louis’ key to make it easier. So Ella adjusted to that and they did everything in one, all 11 songs in one session at the then-new Capitol Studios. And the result is basically, you know, one of the greatest records of all time: Moonlight in Vermont, Cheek to Cheek, Can’t We be Friends, They Can’t Take That Away From Me. Just classics. Classics. So the next time you’re thinking you have a busy week and you maybe don’t have time to pull it together to do your best work, you probably have more… you probably have more time than you think.

“She asked me, ‘When was your first time in England?’” recalled Ellington in 1961. “‘Oh,’ I said, ‘oh, my first time in England was in 1933, way before you were born.’ She gave me a real American look; very cool, man, which I thought was too much.” He also recalls what planted the seeds of the suite: “I told her that she was so inspiring and that something musical would come out of it. She said she would be listening, so I wrote an album for her.”

And so, shortly after that meeting—some accounts say that very night—Ellington sketched a multi‑movement work that became The Queen’s Suite, later developed in collaboration with Billy Strayhorn. The suite is made up of six impressionistic movements mostly inspired by natural scenes Ellington had encountered in his travels: a mockingbird’s call in Florida (“Sunset and the Mocking Bird”), lightning bugs and bullfrogs along the Ohio River (“Lightning Bugs and Frogs,” composed by Strayhorn from Ellington’s description), the northern lights on a lonely Canadian road, and other nature‑tinged images, all very elegant and pastoral.

But then, there’s “The Single Petal of a Rose,” largely solo piano, with, on a very spare rubato bass, Jimmy Woode (he of the classic solo on Ellington’s “Satin Doll”). If you don’t know it, may I suggest you go find it immediately and listen without eliminate all distractions while

Have you ever felt more like you were eavesdropping on someone’s most private thoughts? If there’s a piece of music that more accurately captures the feeling of just having met someone who’s sparked something in you—and perhaps, in that moment, sensing that you sparked something in them—I don’t know it. It feels incredibly intimate. And if I had to guess where its wistfulness comes from, I might suggest it’s the knowledge that—given time and space and royal titles and other very obvious (for 1958) obstacles—they likely wouldn’t share a private moment again.

Ellington recorded the suite with his orchestra in 1959 and had a single master pressing manufactured as a special gold disc, which he sent in secrecy to Buckingham Palace.

And then? He vaulted it, effectively keeping it secret, wanting it to remain a private exchange between the two of them. Ellington reimbursed his label, Columbia, some $2,500 in production costs, to make sure he owned the master tapes (and thus no other copies could be printed). It was released by Norman Granz (and won a Grammy) in 1976, after Ellington’s death.

Listen to “The Single Petal of a Rose” below.

More to discover

• Secret Music - Lapham’s Quarterly

• For many artists, the queen was more cipher than enemy - Los Angeles Times

• Duke Ellington feat. Jimmy Woode, “Satin Doll” (Swiss TV, 1959)

• What Duke Ellington ate for breakfast (archival footage)

I ran into a friend few months ago, and asked my usual question: “What are you listening to?”

She shared the name of an artist I didn’t know (this is why I ask everyone this question, because human algorithm!) and described his music. Then she ended with this:

“He’s so good, I listened to the songs all the way through.”

I knew exactly (and embarrassingly) what she meant. When’s the last time you heard something you liked, added it to a playlist, and thought, “I’ll listen to the whole thing later, when I have time”? The speed of music discovery can be, too often, quite literally blink and you miss it.

For a long time I’ve wanted to find a better way to share my music online.

Streaming is incredibly convenient, but it also has a way of making every song feel like it exists in the same endless scroll. You press play, skip around, move on to something else.

I found myself missing something that physical records and CDs always gave me: the feeling of spending time with one object.

So I’ve built something, an experiment of sorts. It’s called The Listening Room.

Rather than dropping a link to two songs, I’d like to invite you into a space that was designed for listening, for learning about the stories behind the music, and for slowing down.

There are no recommendations, no playlists, no comments, no autoplay. Just the music, the cover art, the program notes, the lyrics, and a quiet room. It’s like slow food, but for music. Slow music. About as artisanal and small-batch as it gets.

I don’t know how it’ll evolve, but for now it’s where I’ll release music before it lands on any of the major streaming services.

Headphones recommended.

→ listen.elizabeth.fm

“I’m not one for superlatives, but Armstrong’s Hot Five recordings are the most influential records in Pop music. More influential than the Beatles or Michael Jackson put together.”

That’s multi-instrumentalist Nicholas Payton singing the praises of Louis Armstrong’s first recordings made with his Hot Five at OKeh in Chicago, whose centennial I was lucky to join recently at The Hot Club of NY, the 78 rpm listening club you’ve probably read about. Hot Club founder Matthew “Fat Cat” Rivera recounted in detail the history of that day, followed by a fantastic live re-creation of the November 12, 1925 recording session led by talented trumpet player/Armstrong scholar/bandmate of mine Andrew Stephens.

Seven things I learned that night — number three really floored me.

1. Louis’ wife/manager/piano player/career rainmaker Lil Hardin Armstrong set up the session with one specific goal in mind: In 1925, even though her husband was was a sought-after sideman and soloist for other bandleaders, the public didn’t know who he was. The Hot Five session would be the first recording to actually bear his name — and it changed the course of his career.

2. I knew the rough contours of the technology, but loved this granular detail: No microphones or electrical equipment here, the whole band played into a single large recording horn, which funneled sound mechanically to a cutting stylus. The stylus engraved the sound vibrations directly onto a rotating wax disc master, which was then used to make shellac 78 rpm records.

3. Louis did something quietly revolutionary in these sessions: He said the musicians’ names in the recording. Laying down gold solo after gold solo in sessions for other bandleaders, he himself had never received public credit, so he made a point to change that with his own outfit. “Whip that thing, Miss Lil!” he calls out to Lil Hardin Armstrong on piano; “Blow it, Kid Ory, blow it kid” to Kid Ory on trombone. Listeners would get to know the players by name, the “we’re all making this up together” vibe would come across for those who couldn’t see the band live, and it showed Louis off as a generous bandleader — he operated on the “to get credit, give it away” model, which comes through in all he does.

4. Louis and Lil each brought an original composition to the date and sold both of them to the record company for a $50 flat fee, forgoing any future royalties. (Deep breaths. So many deep breaths.)

5. Johnny Dodds on clarinet couldn’t play without tapping his foot, which was making a crazy racket on the recording. They stuck a pillow under his foot to dampen the sound.

6. At the end of the session, the record company rep, E.A. Hearn, demanded they record a blues, since those had done well for OKeh. Allegedly Armstrong wasn’t thrilled, but he and the band made up “Gut Bucket Blues” on the spot, naming it after the bucket fishmongers rake guts into. It became the first single.

7. The title “Yes, I’m in the Barrel” is a nod to losing all of one’s clothes to gambling and having to wear a barrel home. Here’s the opening of this total banger from the Hot Club of NY’s Hot Five Centennial jam:

   In a fabulous post-script, pianist Charles Chen recently used the powers of AI for good: You could never really hear Lil Hardin’s piano on these recordings, which only stoked her reputation as a middling pianist and the Hot Five’s weakest link. Charles managed to isolate her piano part and bump it up in the mix so you can really hear it — and lo and behold, Lil is killing it! She’s holding it all down:

   On Lil: A lovely way to begin acquainting yourself with her work and legacy is the 2012 documentary The Girls in the Band, about the untold stories and groundbreaking journeys of female jazz instrumentalists from the 1930s on, streaming for free on Tubi.

[Backstage at Tokyo’s Cotton Club on Christmas Eve]

Happy new year! It’s 2026! What could possibly go wrong?!

1. I spent Christmas Day in Tokyo perusing the second-hand vinyl bins at Tower Records — an actual brick-and-mortar Tower, with astonishing displays handmade by employees. (If you haven’t seen the excellent documentary about the fall of this former music giant, All Things Must Pass, you can stream it for free on YouTube.) My band played six shows at Tokyo’s Cotton Club, and I learned that Christmas in Japan is a bit like Valentine’s Day: It’s a big, romantic affair, and then on the 25th you eat Kentucky Fried Chicken (which began as a marketing ploy, like Santa Claus and Coca-Cola.)

2. I bought only one record that day: 1955’s Clifford Brown With Strings, which I’d never heard and is easily the best $4 I spent in 2025. Arrangements by Neal Hefti. I’ll be geeking out more deeply about this one at some point, but for now, go listen — here’s the whole record on YouTube and Spotify (“Willow Weep for Me” gets me). First spin of my Japanese copy, below. You can judge my low-rent record player, but this puppy lives in the kitchen and could get drop-kicked by my 3-year-old at any time, so.

3. “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” “I’ve Got Rhythm,” and “Georgia on My Mind” are just three classics that landed in the public domain on January 1 (a.k.a. Public Domain Day). Which means you can record a cover without paying royalties to the composers or lyricists, but more mind-bendingly, that you could, say, turn one into a whole new (copyrightable) song. That’s right: If you take the melody of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia on My Mind” and write a new song with it adding “sufficient new and original authorship” (define “sufficient”), you could copyright it. I have no plans to do so, but I find this fascinating. P.S. “Georgia” is my parents’ “song” — specifically, this 1960 recording by Ray Charles.

4. Some things just take the time they take: Over a painstaking six months, Mattias Krantz taught an octopus to play the piano.

6. “I felt that dancing and flying [airplanes] were two ways of getting to the same state. I think that anything that you do with every particle of yourself can be wonderful and can make you forget the world. It’s magic.” I got so much joy and inspiration from this interview with WWII Air Force aviator-turned-Broadway dancer Dancer Stuart Hodes on what dancing does for him. It captures better than I ever could how I feel about playing music with others. Stuart only stopped dancing at the age of 92. (Related: Dick Van Dyke singing “When You’re Smiling” at his recent 100th birthday party, accompanied by Jon Batiste. I’d kill for pitch like that at half his age.)

7. “Each song and each act of creativity, indeed, is an act of defiance in a world that often feels determined to destroy itself…. We have a choice: To be on the side of creation, or surrender to the powers that destroy.” That’s Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy in the foreword to his book How to Write One Song, which I’ve been devouring:

   No one writes “songs” plural. They write one song, and then another […] to disappear—to watch your concept of time evaporate, to live at least once inside a moment where you aren’t “trying” to do anything or be anything anymore. To spend time in a place where you just are. […] That’s something that doesn’t happen through “songs” plural. It only happens when you’ve lost yourself in the process of making one song.

   I’ve thought a lot about how it’s almost impossible, in life, in the world, to ever just BE, but Tweedy nails here something I didn’t even realize I loved about writing songs. I completely forget myself and live inside the song for a bit.

8. The wild, weird story of how a late-career Ella Fitzgerald had to break a glass in her audition to become the face of Memorex cassettes.

9. Life lately: I played with the stunning Seattle Symphony on NYE, I shared why Rob Reiner is the reason I moved to New York, and I kicked off co-hosting the Noir City film festival with TCM’s Eddie Muller.

10. Finally, a context-free photo: George and Ira Gershwin take a break from playing ping pong, circa 1925.

Lead photo: Backstage at Tokyo’s Cotton Club on Christmas Eve with the band: Jen Hodge, David Berger, Todd Londagin, J. Walter Hawkes, Matt Ray

Hi, I’m Elizabeth Bougerol.

I’ve been singing, writing, arranging, and evangelizing traditional jazz and vintage pop for nearly 20 years. As the co-founder, frontwoman, and creative force behind early-jazz revivalists The Hot Sardines, I’ve recorded eight albums, toured globally, and sold out rooms from the Newport Jazz Festival to Carnegie Hall.

My favorite part of this ride, hands down, has been connecting with others — in the band, in the audience, but also online — about music. And increasingly, the most meaningful and in-depth connections are happening away from traditional social media.

I love learning and sharing the (often little-told) history behind the music — the artists, moments, and movements that shaped 20th-century pop, the songs that tell a century of our collective stories. That might be the surprising backstory of a legendary Ella Fitzgerald album, or my take on Duke Ellington’s most haunting work. Elizabeth.fm is my place to share those, along with what’s inspiring and delighting me: Interviews with artists, music documentaries, playlists, the best $4 I spent on vinyl in Tokyo. It’s also where I share behind-the-scenes looks at my own projects.

I’ve gotten to share the joy of playing with tens of thousands of ticket buyers over the years, and engage virtually with nearly 50,000 fans online — and I’ve learned that you’re a smart, passionate, wholehearted bunch who thrive on connecting over a love of music just as much as I do. For me, it’s time to do less scrolling and more thriving.

Finally: There are lots of very worthy minds publishing online these days, so thank you for visiting!

xo Elizabeth

p.s. If you’d like to see where I’m performing next, head to elizabeth.live.