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Ella Fitzgerald

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Ella Fitzgerald

Ella Jane Fitzgerald (April 25, 1917 – June 15, 1996), also known as Lady Ella (the First Lady of Jazz), was one of the most influential jazz singers of the 20th Century, the winner of thirteen Grammy Awards, the National Medal of Art presented by President Reagan and the Presidential Medal of Freedom presented by the elder President Bush. Gifted with a three-octave vocal range, she was noted for her purity of tone, near faultless phrasing and intonation, and a "horn-like" improvisational ability, particularly in her scat singing.

She was born in Newport News, Virginia, USA in April 1917, and raised in Yonkers, New York. She was orphaned at age 14, following the sudden death of her mother from a heart attack at age 38 and the disappearance of her father shortly following her birth.

History

Fitzgerald made her singing debut at age 16 in 1934 at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, New York, in one of the earliest of its famous "Amateur Nights". She had originally intended to go on stage and dance, but intimidated by the 'Edwards Sisters', a local dance duo, she opted to sing. Winning the competition that night, Fitzgerald was noticed by Bardu Ali of Chick Webb's band, who persuaded Webb to hire her. She began singing with Webb's Orchestra in 1935, at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom. Fitzgerald recorded several hit songs with them, including "(If You Can't Sing It), You'll Have to Swing It (Mr. Paganini)", but it was her version of the nursery rhyme, "A Tisket A Tasket" that bought her wide public acclaim.

When Chick Webb died in 1939, the band continued touring under its new name, "Ella Fitzgerald and Her Famous Orchestra."

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Ella Fitzgerald photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1940

She began her solo career in 1941. During this time, her manager was Decca's Milt Gabler. The jazz impresario Norman Granz, felt that Fitzgerald was given unsutible material to record, songs which painted her as more of a 'pop' singer than a jazz artist.

In 1955, after Fitzgerald left the Decca label, her manager, Norman Granz, created a jazz record company, Verve, around her.

The eight 'Songbooks' that Fitzgerald recorded for Verve at irregular intervals from 1956 to 1964 represent her most critically acclaimed and commercially successful work, and probably her most significant offering to American culture. The composers and lyricists for each album represent the greatest part of the cultural canon known as the Great American Songbook.

The eight albums are:

The arrangers for each album are in brackets.

A few days after Fitzgerald's death, The New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote that in the songbook series, Fitzgerald "performed a cultural transaction as extraordinary as Elvis's contemporaneous integration of white and African-American soul. Here was a black woman popularizing urban songs often written by immigrant Jews to a national audience of predominantly white Christians." Frank Sinatra was moved out of respect for Fitzgerald to block Capitol from re-releasing his own albums in a similar, single composer vein.

Fitzgerald on the cover of her 1962 album Ella Swings Gently with Nelson

Fitzgerald also recorded albums exculsively devoted to the songs of Porter and Gershwin in 1972 and 1983, the albums being Ella Loves Cole and Nice Work If You Can Get It respectively. A later collection devoted to a single composer occurred during the Pablo years, Ella Abraça Jobim, featuring the songs of Antonio Carlos Jobim.

Collaborations with other Jazz artists

Fitzgerald's most famous collaborations were with the trumpeter Louis Armstrong, the guitarist Joe Pass and the band leaders Count Basie and Duke Ellington.

Fitzgerald had a number of famous jazz musicians and soloists as 'sidemen' over her long career. The trumpeters Roy Eldridge and Dizzy Gillespie, the guitarist Herb Ellis, and the pianists Tommy Flanagan, Oscar Peterson, Lou Levy, Paul Smith, Ellis Larkins all worked with Ella mostly in live, small group settings.

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Sinatra and Fitzgerald on Sinatra's 'Timex special' television show (1958)

Perhaps Fitzgerald's greatest collaboration, (in terms of popular music) would have been a studio album with Frank Sinatra. Unfortunately Fitzgerald and Frank were to appear on the same stage only periodically over the years, in television specials in 1958 and 1959, and again in 1967, a show that also featured Antonio Carlos Jobim. Fitzgerald's appearance with Sinatra and Count Basie in June 1974 for a series of concerts at Caesar's Palace, Las Vegas was seen as an important imputus upon Sinatra returning from his self-imposed retirement of the early 1970's. The shows were a great success, and September of that year saw them gross $1,000,000 in two weeks on Broadway.

Film and television appearances

Fitzgerald appeared alongside Peggy Lee as an actress and singer in Jack Webb's jazz film Pete Kelly's Blues. She also appeared in the Abbot and Costello film Ride 'Em Cowboy, the 1958 movie St. Louis Blues, and Let No Man Write My Epitaph (1960).

She made a cameo appearance in the 1980's television drama The White Shadow.

Fitzgerald made numerous guest appearences on television shows, singing alongside Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Mel Torme and many others.

Perhaps her most unusual and intriguing performance was of the 'Three Little Maids' song from Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operetta The Mikado alongside Dame Joan Sutherland and Dinah Shore for a 1968 TV special.

Personal life

Fitzgerald married twice, though there is evidence that she may have married a third time. In 1941 she married Benny Kornegay, a convicted drug dealer and hustler. The marriage was quickly annulled. Fitzgerald married for the second time in 1947 to the famous bass player Ray Brown. Together they adopted a child born to Fitzgerald's half-sister Francis, whom they christened Ray Brown, Jr. Fitzgerald and Brown divorced in 1952, most likely due to the various career pressures they were both experiencing at the time.

In July 1957, Reuters reported that Fitzgerald had secretly married Thor Einar Larsen, a young Norwegian in Oslo. She had even gone as far as furnishing an apartment in Oslo, but the affair was quickly forgotten once Larsen was sentenced to five months hard labour in Sweden for stealing money from a young woman he had previously been engaged to.

Already blinded because she suffered from diabetes, both her legs were amputated in 1993, and in 1996 she died in Beverly Hills, California, at the age of 79. She is interred in the Inglewood Park Cemetery in Inglewood, California. Several of Fitzgerald's awards, significant personal posessions and documents were donated to the Smithsonian Institution, the library of the University of Boston and the Library of Congress.

Cultural references

The female jazz singers Dee Dee Bridgewater, Patti Austin and Ann Hampton Callaway have all recorded albums in tribute to Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald is also referred to on the 1980' song "Ella, elle l' a" by French singer France Gall, the 1976 Stevie Wonder hit, Sir Duke from his album 'Songs in the Key of Life', and the song 'I Love Being Here With You', written by Peggy Lee and Bill Schluger.

Ann Hampton Callaway's 1996 album 'To Ella with Love' features 14 jazz standards made popular by Fitzgerald, and the album also features the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis.

Bridgewater's 1997 album, 'Dear Ella' featured many musicians that were closely associated with Fitzgerald during her career, including the pianist Lou Levy, the trumpeter Benny Powell, and Fitzgerald's second husband, the bassist Ray Brown. Bridgewater's next album, 'Live at Yoshi's' was recorded on April 25th 1998, Fitzgerald's 81st birthday.

The folk singer Odetta's 1998 album 'To Ella' is dedicated to Fitzgerald, but features no songs associated with her, and Fitzgerald's long serving accompianist Tommy Flanagan affectionately remembered Fitzgerald on his 1994 album 'Lady be Good...For Ella'.

Patti Austin's 2002 album, 'For Ella' features 11 songs most immediatly associated with Fitzgerald, and a 12th song, 'Hearing Ella Sing' is Austin's tribute to Fitzgerald. The album was nomiated for a Grammy.

In the American sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun, Sally Solomon orders a pizza with extra 'Mozzarella Fitzgerald', and in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Will's grandmother is mistaken for Ella Fitzgerald by an over-eager photographer. In the cartoon comedy Family Guy, "Ella Fitzgerald Griffin" (an African-American, female version of the show's main character, Peter Griffin ) appears in a short scene where she sings accompanied by a young, sighted Ray Charles. As "Ella" sings, a wine glass sitting on the piano shatters, and pieces of glass are projected into Ray Charles's eyes (as if this incident caused his blindness). The shattering of the wine glass references Fitzgerald, s own attempts at this in a commercial for Memorex.

Discography

For a listing of Fitzgerald's albums and singles, see Ella Fitzgerald discography.

Samples

Awards, Citations and Honors

Quotations

  • "I call her the High Priestess of Song." - Mel Torme
  • "I didn't realise our songs were so good until Ella sang them." - Ira Gershwin
  • "She had a vocal range so wide you needed an elevator to go from the top to the bottom. There's nobody to take her place." - David Brinkley
  • "Her artistry brings to mind the words of the maestro, Mr. Toscanini, who said concerning singers, 'Either you're a good musician or you're not.' In terms of musicianship, Ella Fitzgerald was beyond category." - Duke Ellington
  • "She made the mark for all female singers, especially black female singers, in our industry." - Dionne Warwick
  • "Her recordings will live forever... she'll sound as modern 200 years from now." - Tony Bennett
  • "Play an Ella ballad with a cat in the room, and the animal will invariably go up to the speaker, lie down and purr." - Geoffrey Fidelman (author of the Ella Fitzgerald biography, First Lady of Song)

Quotes

  • “I stole everything I ever heard, but mostly I stole from the horns.”
  • “It isn't where you came from, its where you're going that counts.”
  • “Just don't give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don't think you can go wrong.”
  • “The only thing better than singing is more singing.”
  • "Some kids in Italy call me 'Mama Jazz; I thought that was so cute. As long as they don't call me 'Grandma Jazz.'"
  • "Oh, I have gobs and gobs of ideas, but...well, you dream things like that, and that's what these are, you know--my day dreams."
  • “I sing like I feel."
  • "A lot of singers think all they have to do is exercise their tonsils to get ahead. They refuse to look for new ideas and new outlets, so they fall by the wayside. . . I'm going to try to find out the new ideas before the others do."
  • "I know I'm no glamour girl, and it's not easy for me to get up in front of a crowd of people. It used to bother me a lot, but now I've got it figured out that God gave me this talent to use, so I just stand there and sing."
  • "Coming through the years, and finding that I not only have just the fans of my day, but the young ones of today -- that's what it means, it means it was worth all of it."
  • "Once, when we were playing at the Apollo, Holiday was working a block away at the Harlem Opera House. Some of us went over between shows to catch her, and afterwards we went backstage. I did something then, and I still don't know if it was the right thing to do - I asked her for her autograph."
  • "I guess what everyone wants more than anything else is to be loved. And to know that you loved me for my singing is too much for me. Forgive me if I don't have all the words. Maybe I can sing it and you'll understand."
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