"I never knew how good our songs were," Ira Gershwin once said, "until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them."Īlthough most biographies give her birth date as 1918, her birth certificate and school records show her to have been born a year earlier, on April 25, 1917, in Newport News, Va.
#Ella fitzgerald songbook series#
Her series of "Songbook" albums, celebrating such songwriters as Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart and Duke Ellington, helped to elevate the work of the best American songwriters to a stature widely recognized as art song. But her perfect intonation, vocal acrobatics, clear diction and endless store of melodic improvisations - all driven by powerful rhythmic undercurrents - brought her nearly universal acclaim.ĭuring her long career, Miss Fitzgerald recorded with Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Louis Armstrong. (The jazz historian Barry Ulanov traced the term be-bop to her spontaneous interpolation of the word "re-bop" in her 1939 recording of "T'Ain't What You Do, It's the Way That You Do It.") She was sometimes criticized for a lack of bluesiness and emotional depth. Miss Fitzgerald was renowned both for her delicately rendered ballads and her pyrotechnical displays of scat improvisation. At her jazziest, her material became a springboard for ever-changing, ebullient vocal inventions, delivered in a sweet, girlish voice that could leap, slide or growl anywhere within a range of nearly three octaves. Her repertory encompassed show tunes, jazz songs, novelties (like her first major hit, "A-Tisket A-Tasket," recorded in 1938), bossa nova, and even opera ("Porgy and Bess" excerpts, recorded with Louis Armstrong). Over the decades, Miss Fitzgerald performed with big bands, symphony orchestras and small jazz groups. Her apparent equanimity and her clear pronunciation, which transcended race, ethnicity, class and age, made her a voice of profound reassurance and hope. Where Holiday and Frank Sinatra lived out the dramas they sang about, Miss Fitzgerald, viewing them from afar, seemed to understand and forgive all. Even when handed a sad song, Miss Fitzgerald communicated a wistful, sweet-natured compassion for the heartache she described. Stylistically she was the polar opposite of her equally legendary peer, Billie Holiday, who conveyed a wounded vulnerability. In a career that spanned six decades, Miss Fitzgerald stood above the emotional fray of the scores of popular standards she performed. Mel Torme hailed her as having "the best ear of any singer ever." Until the 1970's, when physical problems began to impinge on her perfect technique, this hefty, unglamorous woman seemed to loom as an immutable creative force in a musical world where everything else was crumbling. "Man, woman or child, Ella is the greatest," Crosby once said. Musicians from Bing Crosby to Benny Goodman, when asked to name their favorite singer, cited Ella Fitzgerald. In 1993, both of her legs were amputated below the knees.Ī pre-eminent American singer who brought a classic sense of musical proportion and balance to everything she touched, Miss Fitzgerald won the sobriquet "first lady of song" and earned the unqualified admiration of most of her peers. She had been suffering from diabetes and its eyesight and circulatory system complications for many years. Ella Fitzgerald, whose sweet, silvery voice and endlessly inventive vocal improvisations made her the most celebrated jazz singer of her generation, died yesterday at home in Beverly Hills, Calif.
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