Ella Jane Fitzgerald was an American jazz singer often referred to as the First Lady of Song, Queen of Jazz and Lady Ella. She was noted for her purity of tone, impeccable diction, phrasing and intonation, and a "horn-like" improvisational ability, particularly in her scat singing.
Background
Ella Fitzgerald was born on April 25, 1918, in Newport News, Virginia, to William Fitzgerald and Temperance "Tempie" Fitzgerald. Her parents were not legally married. When she was two-and-a-half-years old, her parents separated. She spent her formative years in Yonkers, New York.
In 1932, Ella's mother died from serious injuries she received in a car accident when Fitzgerald was 15 years of age. This left her at first in the care of her stepfather but before the end of April 1933, she had moved in with her aunt in Harlem.
Education
Ella began her formal education at the age of six and proved to be an outstanding student, moving through a variety of schools before attending Benjamin Franklin Junior High School from 1929.
Career
Ella used to sing on the streets to make her living. When only 16, she received her first big break at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, when she won an amateur night contest and impressed saxophonist-bandleader 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. 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 songwriting 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 Ella 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 Ella 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, 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. Fitzgerald died on June 15, 1996 at the age of 78.
Ella Fitzgerald is considered to be one of the greatest scat singers in jazz history. 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.
Quotations:
"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."
"It isn't where you came from, its where you're going that counts."
"Everybody wants to know about my style and how it came about. It's no big secret. It's the way I feel."
"I don't want to say the wrong thing, which I always do. I think I do better when I sing."
"What everyone wants more than anything else is to be loved."
Personality
Ella was 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. A large, pleasant-looking woman with a surprisingly girlish speaking voice, Ella Fitzgerald had a propensity for forgetting lyrics.
Quotes from others about the person
"She frequently used shorter, stabbing phrases, and her voice was harder, with a wider vibrato", one biographer wrote.
Trumpet player Mario Bauzá, who played behind Fitzgerald in her early years with Chick Webb, remembered that "she didn't hang out much. When she got into the band, she was dedicated to her music... She was a lonely girl around New York, just kept herself to herself, for the gig."
Interests
Music & Bands
Connee Boswell, Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby
Connections
Ella 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).
