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 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. I’ll share those here, along with what’s inspiring and delighting me these days: Interviews with artists, music documentaries, the best $4 I spent on vinyl in Tokyo, and more. And I’ll also share a behind-the-scenes glimpse at my own projects.

I’ve gotten to share the joy of playing with tens of thousands of ticket buyers over the years, and engaging virtually with nearly 50,000 of you online — and I’ve learned that fans of my work are a smart, passionate, heartfelt 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.

“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’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.

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.

[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