A 1938 swing hit with Chick Webb's band, built on a nursery rhyme about a lost yellow basket (1938)
'A-Tisket, A-Tasket', which she co-wrote; it sold a million copies and made her famous at 21.
Popular music · Jazz & blues
Ella Fitzgerald
1917–1996 · American
Jazz and the Great American Songbook
Ella Fitzgerald, the First Lady of Song, combined perfect intonation, a three-octave range and the finest scat singing in jazz. Under her manager Norman Granz she recorded the eight Song Book sets that fixed the Great American Songbook as a canon, and she won thirteen competitive Grammy Awards across a career of some sixty years.
How to spot them
- ▸Nicknames the First Lady of Song, the Queen of Jazz and Lady Ella
- ▸Scat singing — wordless improvisation using bebop lines, especially live
- ▸Chick Webb's orchestra at the Savoy Ballroom; she took over the band when he died in 1939
- ▸Norman Granz, her manager, and Verve Records, the label he built around her
- ▸Duets with Louis Armstrong; the Song Book series, one composer at a time
Songs & albums
Eight Verve sets recorded 1956–64, each devoted to one composer of the American popular repertoire (1956–1964)
The Song Books — Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern and Johnny Mercer.
A 1960 Berlin concert recording in which she forgets the words to a Brecht and Weill ballad and improvises a new lyric (1960)
'Mack the Knife' on Ella in Berlin: Mack the Knife — it won her two Grammys.
A 1947 scat tour de force on a 1940 standard that puts a question to the night sky (1947)
'How High the Moon' — her bebop calling card, quoting Charlie Parker's 'Ornithology'.
A 1956 album of standards pairing her with a gravel-voiced trumpeter, backed by the Oscar Peterson trio (1956)
Ella and Louis, with Louis Armstrong; two sequels followed, including a Porgy and Bess set.
A series of tape cassette advertisements in which her voice shatters a wine glass and the viewer is challenged to say whether they are hearing the singer or the tape (1972)
The Memorex campaign — 'Is it live, or is it Memorex?'
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Newport News, Virginia, in 1917; she won Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater in November 1934, having gone on intending to dance
- •She led Chick Webb's orchestra after his death in 1939, billing it as Ella Fitzgerald and Her Famous Orchestra
- •At the first Grammy ceremony in 1959 she became the first African American woman to win a Grammy, taking two awards
- •She won thirteen competitive Grammys in all, plus a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1967
- •Norman Granz founded Verve Records in 1956 largely to release her Song Book albums
- •She received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1979, the National Medal of Arts in 1987 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1992
- •She was named an NEA Jazz Master in 1985
- •She told how Marilyn Monroe secured her a booking at Hollywood's Mocambo club in 1955 by promising to sit at a front table every night
- •Diabetes led to both her legs being amputated below the knee in 1993; she died in Beverly Hills in June 1996
Drill it — 8 cards
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Sources
- National Endowment for the Arts — Ella Fitzgerald — NEA Jazz Masters
- Stuart Nicholson — Ella Fitzgerald: A Biography of the First Lady of Jazz