FITZGERALD, ELLA 1920-

Jazz singer

Discovered

Ella Fitzgerald was not quite fifteen years old when she made her professional singing debut at a Yale University party in March 1935. She had been discovered the previous year at the Harlem Opera House, where she won an amateur talent contest for singing a Connie Boswell song. Heartened by the success, Fitzgerald entered more contests, eventually winning a week's performance with Tony Bradshaw's band in February 1935. Bardu Ali, then an announcer with Chick Webb's band, heard her singing for Bradshaw and later brought her to Webb for an impromptu audition, which led to her being hired for the Yale gig a month later. She had made a large leap quickly. Born in Norfolk, Virginia, and raised in Yonkers, New York, by her mother, Ella Fitzgerald made an immediate impact on jazz singing in her time, redefined the role of the jazz singer, and eventually broadened the scope of her music beyond jazz to popular singing.

Early Career

Shortly after Ella's professional debut, her mother was killed in an automobile accident. New York labor laws prevented the fifteen-year-old Fitzgerald from performing without a guardian's consent. The result was that bandleader Chick Webb and his wife legally adopted Fitzgerald and brought her into their home. Webb became a parent, guardian, and teacher to Fitzgerald, developing her singing style and bringing her out slowly to the crowds at the Savoy, Harlem's hottest and most crowded club. The swing era was in full glory when Fitzgerald began recording with Webb in 1936. Songs such as "Sing Me a Swing Song and Let Me Dance," "I'll Chase Your Blues Away," and "If You Can't Sing It, You'll Have to Swing It" (later called "Mr. Paganini") popularized Fitzgerald. In 1937 a Down Beat readers' poll confirmed her as the top female vocalist. Fitzgerald, along with Billie Holiday, was among the first female singers to become an integral part of the big band. Webb began to feature Fitzgerald more, arranging songs around her to capitalize on her popularity. She even began to compose and arrange, scoring a huge hit with "A-Tisket, A-Tasket" in 1938. She was eighteen years old.

Bandleader

The success of "A-Tisket, A-Tasket" got the Chick Webb band booked in previously white-only venues such as the Park Central Hotel, where Fitzgerald continued to win fans. But in 1939 the thirty-year-old Webb died of pneumonia. Due to her popularity, Fitzgerald became the band's leader, though primarily in name only. She was among the youngest bandleaders and one of the few women nationwide leading an all-male band. She also continued to write songs, scoring hits with "Just One of Those Nights" and "Serenade to a Sleeping Beauty." Swing was beginning its decline, and Fitzgerald began to branch out. She recorded a single hit ("All I Need Is You") with the Four Keys in 1940 and appeared in Abbott and Costello's movie Ride 'Em Cowboy in 1942. But her music suffered in popularity. In the 1941 poll in Down Beat she fell to fourth among vocalists. She married dockworker Benny Kornegay in 1941 and had the marriage annulled within two years. By 1942 the Chick Webb band had broken up. The first stage of Fitzgerald's career had come to a halt.

New Directions

In the mid 1940s Fitzgerald moved in new directions that not only revived her stagnant career but also had a great impact on jazz music. She had helped popularize jazz singing in the late 1930s and redefined it in the 1940s. First she began branching out. In 1946 she recorded with Louis Jordan a calypso song "Stone Cold Dead in the Market" and scored a hit. More important, she began singing with Dizzy Gillespie, one of the seminal figures in bop music. In the spirit of bop's emphasis on individual improvisation, Fitzgerald began scat singing, using her voice as an instrument, singing the syncopated improvisations similar to those usually played on saxophone or trumpet. Songs such as "Lady Be Good" and "How High the Moon" popularized bop and made Fitzgerald a favorite in New York at jazz clubs. She married again in 1948 (to bass player Ray Brown) and in the same year made the acquaintance of promoter Norman Granz, the man who led Fitzgerald's career through the 1980s. Granz promoted a touring band called "Jazz at the Philharmonic." The group toured some twenty weeks a year for more than a decade. Granz was not only a promoter and founder of Verve, a recording label, he was also a social activist. "Jazz at the Philharmonic" shows, wherever it toured, resisted segregation at hotels and restaurants. The band, which included Herb Ellis, Gillespie, and Brown, toured worldwide. By 1953 Fitzgerald was again the number one jazz vocalist in the Down Beat polls. In 1955 Granz, by then Ella's manager, negotiated her out of her binding deal with Decca records and began recording her on his Verve label.

Songbooks

In 1955 Fitzgerald, always looking for new directions for her singing, agreed with Granz's idea to broaden her career even further. She moved away from the world of jazz with a series of Songbook albums, each focusing on one popular stage composer of previous decades. The first Songbook, a collection of thirty-two Cole Porter songs, sold more than one hundred thousand copies and broadened Fitzgerald's audience even further. She continued with albums of Rodgers and Hart, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Johnny Mercer, Duke Ellington, and George and Ira Gershwin. She also recorded three albums with Louis Armstrong, including Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. By doing the Songbooks she not only broadened her own audience but also brought much great American music back to life. The Berlin and Ellington Songbooks each won Grammy Awards. Some jazz critics were upset with Fitzgerald's departure from pure jazz for popular music, but the audience response was overwhelming. Fitzgerald had again redefined herself through popular singing.

Legend

Her career slowed after 1960, though she remained a popular touring entertainer. In the 1980s Fitzgerald was still performing thirty-six weeks a year while the honors rolled in. In 1974 the University of Maryland dedicated the Ella Fitzgerald School of Performing Arts. She received honorary degrees from Princeton, Harvard, Dartmouth, Boston University, UCLA, and Washington University, among others. In 1986 Ella Fitzgerald was named doctor of music at Yale University, where fifty-one years before she had begun what would become among the most prominent vocalist careers in American music history.

Sources:

Stuart Nicholson, Ella Fitzgerald: A Biography of the First Lady of Jazz (New York: Scribners, 1994);

Carolyn Wyman, Ella Fitzgerald: Jazz Singer Supreme (New York: Franklin Watts, 1993).

Ella Fitzgerald

Ella Fitzgerald (1918-1996) was one of the most exciting jazz singers of her time and, because of the naturalness of her style, had a popular appeal that extended far beyond the borders of jazz.

Ella Fitzgerald was born on April 25, 1918, in Newport News, Virginia, but spent her formative years in Yonkers, New York, and received her musical education in its public schools. When only 16, she received her first big break at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, when she won an amateur night contest and impressed saxophonistbandleader Benny Carter. He recommended her to drummer-bandleader Chick Webb, who hired her in 1935. She soon became a recording star with the band, and her own composition "A-tisket, A-tasket"(1938) was such a smash hit that the song became her trademark for many years thereafter. When Webb died in 1939, Fitzgerald assumed leadership of the band for the next year.

By 1940 Fitzgerald was recognized throughout the music world as a vocal marvel—a singer with clarity of tone, flexibility of range, fluency of rhythm, and, above all, a talent for improvisation that was equally effective on ballads and up-tempo tunes. Although for a long time her reputation with musicians and other singers outstripped that with the general public, she corrected the imbalance soon after joining Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP) in 1946. She made annual tours with the group and was invariably the concert favorite. Three of her unfailing show-stoppers were "Oh, Lady Be Good," "Stomping at the Savoy," and "How High the Moon." Each would begin at a medium tempo and then turn into a rhythmic excursion as Fitzgerald moved up-tempo and "scatted"(that is, sang harmonic variations of the melody in nonsense syllables). The huge JATP crowds always responded tumultuously.

By the early 1950s Fitzgerald's domination of fans' and critics' polls was absolute. In fact, she won the Down Beat readers' poll every year from 1953 to 1970 and became known as "The First Lady of Song." In 1955 she terminated her 20-year recording affiliation with Decca in order to record for Norman Granz's Verve label and proceeded to produce a series of superlative "Songbook" albums, each devoted to the compositions of a great songwriter or song-writing team (Jerome Kern and Johnny Mercer; George and Ira Gershwin; Cole Porter; Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart; Irving Berlin; Duke Ellington). The lush orchestrations induced Fitzgerald to display the classy pop-singer side of herself; even in the two-volume Ellington set her jazzier side deferred to the melodist in her.

Under Granz's personal management Fitzgerald also began to play choice hotel jobs and made her first featured film appearance, in "Pete Kelly's Blues"(1955). In 1957 she worked at the Copacabana in New York City and gave concerts at the Hollywood Bowl. In 1958, in the company of the Duke Ellington Orchestra, she gave a concert at Carnegie Hall as part of an extended European and United States tour with the band. In the early 1960s she continued to work the big hotel circuit—the Flamingo in Las Vegas, the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, and the Americana in New York City—and to tour Europe, Latin America, and Japan with the Oscar Peterson trio, which was three-fourths of Granz's JATP house rhythm section. In 1965 and 1966 she was reunited with Ellington for another tour and record date.

Fitzgerald was always blessed with superb accompanists, from the full orchestral support of Chick Webb and Duke Ellington to the smaller JATP ensembles. In 1968 she teamed up with yet another, the magnificent pianist Tommy Flanagan, who headed a trio that served her into the mid-1970s. In 1971 Fitzgerald had serious eye surgery, but within a year she was performing again. Her singing, however, began to show evidence of decline: the voice that was once an instrument of natural luster and effortless grace became a trifle thin and strained. Nevertheless, so great was her artistry that she continued to excite concert audiences and to record effectively. She appeared after the mid-1960s with over 50 symphonic orchestras in the United States.

A large, pleasant-looking woman with a surprisingly girlish speaking voice, Ella Fitzgerald had a propensity for forgetting lyrics. This endeared her to audiences, who delighted in her ability to work her way out of these selfpainted corners. Unlike some other great jazz singers (Billie Holiday, Anita O'Day), Fitzgerald had a private life devoid of drug-related notoriety. She was twice married: the first marriage, to Bernie Kornegay in 1941, was annulled two years later; the second, to bassist Ray Brown in 1948, ended in divorce in 1952 (they had one son).

Was Ella Fitzgerald essentially a jazz singer or a pop singer? Jazz purists say that she lacked the emotional depth of Billie Holiday, the imagination of Sarah Vaughan or Anita O'Day, and the blues-based power of Dinah Washington and that she was often facile, glossy, and predictable. The criticisms sprang partly from her "crossover" popularity and ignored her obvious strengths and contributions: Fitzgerald was not only one of the pioneers of scatsinging, but, beyond that, she was an unpretentious singer whose harmonic variations were always unforced and a supreme melodist who never let her ego get in the way of any song she sang.

Fitzgerald died on June 15, 1996 at the age of 78. She left a legacy that won't soon be forgotten. In her lifetime she was honored with no less than 12 Grammys, the Kennedy Center Award, as well as an honorary doctorate in music from Yale University. In 1992 she was honored by President George Bush with the National Medal of Freedom. Fitzgerald's impressive financial estate was left in a trust, including the $2.5 million in proceeds from the sale of her Beverly Hills home.

Further Reading

There is no biography of Ella Fitzgerald, but there are excellent chapters on her in Leonard Feather's From Satchmo to Miles (1972) and Henry Pleasants' The Great American Popular Singers (1974). Also see Jet (December 28, 1992). □

Ella Fitzgerald 1917–96, American jazz singer, b. Newport News, Va. Probably the most celebrated jazz vocalist of her generation, Fitzgerald was reared in Yonkers, N.Y., moving after her mother's death (1932) to Harlem, where two years later she won an amateur contest at the Apollo Theater. Thereafter she performed with Chick Webb's band. After he died in 1939 she managed the band herself until 1942, when she began to make solo appearances in supper clubs and theaters. Principally a jazz and blues singer of remarkably sweet and effortless style, Fitzgerald was noted for her sophisticated interpretation of songs by George Gershwin and Cole Porter and for her scat singing, an extremely inventive form of vocal jazz improvisation.

Fitzgerald, whose superb voice, wide repertoire, and accessible singing style appealed to both jazz and pop audiences, scored her first recording hit with "A-Tisket A-Tasket" (1938) and went on to become a perennially popular artist with such performances as the million-selling "I'm Making Believe" (1944, with the Ink Spots), the historic scat "Flying Home" (1945), the be-bop "Lady Be Good" (1947), and many hundreds more. She also wrote a number of songs and made numerous concert tours of the United States, Europe, and Asia. She appeared in several films, including Pete Kelly's Blues (1955) and St. Louis Blues (1958). Despite ill health, Fitzgerald continued performing into the early 1990s.

Bibliography: See biography by S. Nicholson (1994); C. Zwerin, dir., Ella Fitzgerald: Something to Live For (documentary film, 1999).

Fitzgerald, Ella (b Newport News, Va., 1918; d Beverly Hills, Calif., 1996). Amer. singer. Sang in Harlem clubs in early 1930s until discovered by Chick Webb with whose band she sang from 1934. On his death in 1939 she led the band until 1942 when she became a free-lance. Toured Eur., Canada, Japan, and USA with Norman Granz's ‘Jazz at the Philharmonic’ from 1946. In scat-singing, improvised melody and harmony to compete with instrumentalists. Sang at Carnegie Hall, NY, with Ellington, 1958. Made films and many recordings.

Fitzgerald, Ella (1917–96) US jazz singer. Chick Webb discovered the ‘First Lady of Song’ at Harlem's Apollo Theatre in 1934. Ella's first hit was “A-Tisket A-Tasket” (1938). Her Songbook series of renditions of popular ‘standards’ by George Gershwin, Jerome Kern and Cole Porter have become definitive. She worked with most of the jazz greats of her era, including Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Louis Armstrong.