Ella Jane Fitzgerald (placeholder)

My Fantasy Island wish would be to be Ella for a day. To soulfully sing to a lover, and scat midst Mac the Knife till dawn.

Ella Jane Fitzgerald was born in Newport News, Virginia, USA in April 1917. Her father, William Fitzgerald, and mother, Temperance (Tempie) Fitzgerald separated soon after her birth. Ella and her mother, moved to Yonkers, New York, moving in with Tempie’s boyfriend Joseph Da Silva.

Ella’s half-sister, Frances Fitzgerald, was born in 1923.

In 1932, Ella’s mother died from serious injuries received in a car accident. After staying with Da Silva for a short time, Tempie’s sister Virginia took Ella in. Shortly afterward, Da Silva suffered a heart attack and died, and her sister Frances joined Ella with Virginia.

Following these dramatic events, Ella’s academic grades dropped dramatically, and she frequently skipped school. After getting into trouble with the police, she was taken into custody and sent to a reform school.

Eventually Ella escaped from the reformatory, and for a time was homeless.

She made her singing debut at age 16 on November 21, 1934 at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, New York. Ella’s name was pulled in a weekly drawing at the Apollo and she won the opportunity to compete 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, in the style of her idol, Connie Boswell. She sang Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Judy’, and ‘The Object of My Affections’, another song by the Boswell Sisters, that night.

In January 1935 she won the chance to perform for a week with the Tiny Bradshaw band at the Harlem Opera House. Ella met drummer and bandleader Chick Webb here for the first time. Webb had already hired male singer Charlie Linton to work with the band, but he offered Ella the opportunity to test with his band when they played a dance at Yale University. Despite the tough crowd, Ella was a great success, and Webb hired her to travel with the band for $12.50 a week.

She started singing regularly with Webb’s Orchestra through 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)”, and “Love and Kisses” (her first recording) but it was her 1938 version of the nursery rhyme, “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” that brought her wide public acclaim.

When Chick Webb died in 1939, the band continued touring under its new name, “Ella Fitzgerald and Her Famous Orchestra.”
Ella Fitzgerald photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1940
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Ella Fitzgerald photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1940

She began her solo career in 1941. From 1941-1955, her manager was Decca’s Milt Gabler. The jazz impresario Norman Granz felt that Fitzgerald was given unsuitable material to record during this period, many were novelty songs which painted her as more of a ‘pop’ singer than a jazz artist.

Ella had sang at Granz’z JATP concerts for several years, and by 1955, after Fitzgerald left the Decca label, her new manager, Norman Granz, created the 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 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
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Fitzgerald on the cover of her 1962 album Ella Swings Gently with Nelson

Ella Fitzgerald also recorded albums exclusively 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.

Whilst recording the ‘Songbooks’ (and the occasional studio album), Ella toured extensively, both in the United States, and internationally, under the tutelage of Norman Granz, who helped solidify Ella’s position as one of the leading live jazz performers.

There are several live albums on Verve that are highly regarded by critics, Ella at the Opera House, shows a typical JATP set from Ella, Ella in Rome is a verifiable 1950s jazz vocal masterclass, whilst Ella in Berlin is still one of Ella’s biggest selling albums. 1964’s Ella at Juan-Les-Pins, and 1966’s Ella and Duke at the Cote D’Azur both find a confident Ella accompanied by a stellar array of musicians.

Verve Records was sold to MGM in 1963, for $3,000,000, and in 1967, MGM failed to renew Ella’s contract with them. Over the next 5 years, she flitted between several labels, namely Atlantic, Capitol and Reprise. A selection of Ella’s material at this time represent a curious departure away from her typical jazz repertoire; Brighten the Corner, an album of Christian hymns, Misty Blue, a country and western influenced album, and 30 by Ella, a series of six medleys that neatly fulfilled Ella’s obligations for the label.
The surprise success of the 1972 album Jazz at Santa Monica Civic ‘72 led Norman Granz to found his first record label since the sale of Verve, Pablo Records. Ella recorded some 20 albums for the label, her years on Pablo documenting the decline in her voice, but with the occasional flash of brilliance.