Ella Fitzgerald stood at both a peak and a pivot as she took the stage at The Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Arena on June 30, 1967. Earlier that year, she had become the first woman to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammys. She’d been on tour with the Duke Ellington Orchestra, abroad and on both coasts: the Oakland date fell between concerts at Carnegie Hall and the Hollywood Bowl.
At the same time, Ella had recently recorded her final album for Verve, the label that Norman Granz originally created as her platform. She was starting a new era at Capitol, home to the Beach Boys and Peggy Lee. And she had been branching out beyond the jazz and American songbook fare for which she was so beloved — mixing in a bit of Bacharach and David to balance out the Lerner and Loewe.
The Moment of Truth: Ella at the Coliseum, a previously unissued recording from that Oakland concert, captures this dynamic juncture in all its glory. Recently found in Granz’s private collection, it finds Fitzgerald in top form, with a band drawn from the ranks of the Ellington Orchestra, which shared this Granz-produced bill alongside the Oscar Peterson Trio. Due out on Verve on Feb. 28, the album features nine songs of varying provenance; its opener and title track is now available as a digital single.
“The Moment of Truth” was written by Frank Scott, an associate of Lawrence Welk, with the arranger Tex Satterwhite — not a blue-chip songwriting team, though they hit paydirt here. Tony Bennett had recorded it in 1963, and performed it on The Ed Sullivan show; he was likely the vector for Ella’s embrace of the song. (Another successful recording, by Peggy Lee, would be made months after this concert and released in ‘64.)
Ella sounds exuberant digging into the tune’s opening lyric, treating it like Bennett does, as a swinging flag-waver. Her thoroughbred rhythm section has Jimmy Jones on piano, a young Bob Cranshaw on bass, and Sam Woodyard of the Ellington band on drums. A dozen other Duke’s men serve at Ella’s behest, including trumpeters Cat Anderson and Cootie Williams, trombonist Lawrence Brown, and saxophonists Johnny Hodges and Paul Gonsalves. (They’re probably playing arrangements by Jimmy Jones.)

Elsewhere on The Moment of Truth, Ella revisits songs from her Chick Webb era, like “Don’t Be That Way,” and classics from her songbook series, like Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love).” Her crowd-pleasing closer is “Mack the Knife.” But as the estimable critic Will Friedwald observes in his liner notes, “this concert is full of contemporaneous pop songs that were only briefly in Ella’s concert book and that she never officially recorded — and that she sings spectacularly well.”
Among those popular songs is “Alfie,” the Burt Bacharach-Hal David hit from a movie of the same name; a portion of the Coliseum crowd lets loose a delighted yelp as she sings its questioning first phrase. (According to Friedwald, this is the only known recording of Ella singing the tune, and it’s a knockout.)
Also in the category of new pop songs is “Music to Watch Girls By,” which had landed on the Top 20 that year, delivering a Herb Alpert-esque hit for the Bob Crewe Generation, and later Andy Williams.
“The Moment of Truth,” whose lyrics herald the marital upgrade of a love affair, is a more natural fit for Ella: it’s a song of delirious romance but also dawning devotion. As Friedwald writes, it’s also a meta-narrative for Ella’s commitment to her audience and craft: “In a sense, for Ella Fitzgerald, every night was The Moment of Truth.”
Listen for “The Moment of Truth” on Sunday Jazz Brunch and Voices in Big Band Jazz, both hosted by Bob Craig. The Moment Of Truth: Ella At The Coliseum will be released on Verve on Feb. 28.