Critical Mass

Ella the Great

Toasting one of America’s best, most innovative voices

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Ella Fitzgerald Illustration
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Ella Fitzgerald Illustration

"Man, woman and child, Ella is the greatest of them all."

-- Bing Crosby

on Ella Fitzgerald

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Democrat-Gazette file photo

Ella Fitzgerald sings in this undated photograph.

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Album cover for Ella Fitzgerald's "100 Songs for a Centennial"

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Democrat-Gazette file photo

Ella Fitzgerald, circa 1940s publicity photograph

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Democrat-Gazette file photo

The singer Ella Fitzgerald performs at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1973.

For a lot of us, what matters least is the words. What we hear is a beat and a melody, sometimes the beading of silver notes. They say the great ones could sing the phone book. Or nonsense "scat." Some of the greatest have put this theory to the test.

On May 2, 1938, Chick Webb's Orchestra went into Decca Records to record an idea his former ward, the group's 21-year-old singer, Ella Fitzgerald, had. It was a version of the rather inane nursery rhyme "A-Tisket, A-Tasket," something she had been singing to herself. Van Alexander took the lyrics Fitzgerald had been singing -- which differed slightly from the most popular version of the rhyme -- and wrote out an arrangement around her melody.

"I put the children's tune into a 32-bar song," Alexander (who died at 100 in 2015) told Marc Myers in a 2012 interview on his blog JazzWax. "I put the release, the bridge to it, and all the novelty things to it and ... Ella and I went over it and she changed a lot of the words. I had written, in the middle part, 'She was walkin' on down the avenue, without a single thing to do,' and Ella said, 'Let's say she was truckin' on down the avenue'. ... She changed a few other lyrics also. Well, they put it on the air that night, and somebody called Robbins Music in New York and asked them to take [an acetate] off the air. They did and they got very excited about it, and two weeks later they returned to ... Decca Records and recorded it."

Not everyone was all that taken with the tune. Webb's orchestra was broadcasting nearly every night and there was pressure for band members to come up with fresh material, a lot of which would be played once or twice before being discarded. Tenor saxophonist Teddy McRae, who took over as the group's music director after Webb died in 1939, and Fitzgerald assumed leadership. McRae told Fitzgerald's biographer, Stuart Nicholson, that the song was "Ella's own thing. ... her own idea ... we had

nothing to do with that."

When it came down to actually recording the tune, Decca executives had second thoughts. Recording engineer Bob Stephens didn't want to record it and it was only when an obstinate Webb began packing up his drums to leave that they relented. The song entered the charts at No. 10 on June 18, 1938, and two weeks later it was No. 1 on the radio program Your Hit Parade. It stayed there 19 weeks. It re-entered the charts in 1944 after the recording was used in the film Two Girls and a Sailor.

The conventional wisdom is that it introduced Fitzgerald to the nation. While Webb had only featured her vocals on about half of his orchestra's numbers prior to the hit, she was now unquestionably the star of the show. It wasn't long before the billing changed to "Ella Fitzgerald and the Chick Webb Orchestra." A star was born.

I was born 20 years after the song was released, but it is as familiar as almost any pop song released during my lifetime. It became a jazz standard.

Fitzgerald died in 1996 at the age of 79. Her centennial will be celebrated this year with several exhibitions, including one at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and the release of a four-CD boxed set, 100 Songs for a Centennial (Verve/UMe) that spans her work with Decca and Verve records from 1936 to 1966. (In 1966, Fitzgerald's contract with Verve/MGM ended and executives declined to renew her option. While she remained a viable concert draw, her recording career never recovered.)

While Fitzgerald was only 21 when she recorded "A-Tisket, A-Tasket" for the first (but hardly only) time, she was not an unknown quantity. Down Beat magazine voted her best female vocalist the year before -- she prevailed over Count Basie's singer Billie Holiday. In 1937 Fitzgerald had charted two duets with Louis Jordan (who was also with Webb's band) -- "If He Should Ever Leave" and "All or Nothing at All."

In a review of the band's five-week residency in the Flamingo Room of Levaggi's Restaurant in Boston in February 1938, a Down Beat critic wrote: "Ella Fitzgerald is fine, of course .... Her appeal to the public is an amazing thing. Every time she sings she stops things cold ... she's far and away the most popular songstress in the business today."

...

But if Fitzgerald achieved success early, that doesn't mean she was born lucky. She never talked much about her childhood, which is one reason why, until fairly recently, most sources gave the year of her birth as 1918. In fact, she was born on April 25, 1917, in Newport News, Va. Her parents, Temperance and William Fitzgerald, weren't legally married, but lived together for some time after she was born.

In the early 1920s Ella moved with her mother to Yonkers, N.Y., where Temperance became involved with a Portuguese immigrant named Joseph Da Silva. Ella was an excellent student who attended church regularly, devoured the recordings of Bing Crosby and the Boswell Sisters and -- despite the family's meager resources -- may have somehow found the time and money to take piano lessons.

But after Temperance died in 1932 from injuries due to a car wreck, circumstances changed drastically. Teenage Ella moved in with an aunt in Harlem. (Fitzgerald biographer Nicholson, citing rumors of Da Silva's "ill treatment" of Fitzgerald, speculated that she was abused.) Her grades fell, she began skipping school and worked as a numbers runner for the Mafia and as a lookout for a brothel. After a time, she was placed in the Riverdale Orphanage in the Bronx. When the orphanage became crowded, she was transferred to the New York Training School for Girls in Hudson, a state reformatory about 120 miles north of the city.

In 1933 Fitzgerald either escaped or "aged out" of the reformatory, which was meant to house offenders between 12 and 16 years of age, and returned to Harlem, where she was apparently homeless for a time. She survived by singing and dancing in the street.

On Nov. 21, 1934, she entered a talent contest at the Harlem Opera House on 125th Street. Or maybe it was one of the first Amateur Nights at The Apollo Theater, a couple of doors down from the Opera House, which was demolished in 1959. The story goes that Fitzgerald intended to dance, but when it was time to go on she froze with stage fright. As the audience grew restless, she began to sing the recent Hoagy Carmichael hit "Judy" and followed it with Pinky Tomlin's "The Object of My Affection." She won the $25 first-place prize.

The Apollo Theater version holds she wasn't offered the customary weeklong gig at the theater because she was unkempt and dirty. And while that makes a good story, the fact that she did begin a weeklong engagement with the Tiny Bradshaw band at the Harlem Opera House in January 1935 seems to argue that the Opera House was where she won the contest.

That was where Webb, who was looking for a female singer to join the band, first saw her. But he was, as The New York Times later wrote, "reluctant to sign her ... because she was gawky and unkempt." He offered her the chance to try out for the band at a dance they played at Yale University.

She got the gig because -- well, audiences and musicians recognized that she was a force of nature with impeccable timing, remarkably fluent, with pure tone, precise diction and the ability to improvise like a great horn player. Not to mention that she had a wider range than most opera singers and a perfect sense for intonation -- if not genuine perfect pitch.

Fitzgerald could sing anything and make it compelling. Even "A-Tisket, A-Tasket."

...

There may have been another reason Webb was reluctant to sign Fitzgerald -- the Chick Webb Orchestra had a certain brand that was "whiter" than those led by Duke Ellington and Count Basie, maybe even Bennie Goodman's.

"The Webb band never sounded really black," critic and producer Dave Dexter Jr. told Burt Korral for his 1990 book Drummin' Men: The Heartbeat of Jazz: The Bebop Years (Oxford University Press). "Here was one of the greatest drummers of all time, a black artist leading a black band featuring a black singer. And the music lacked the black characteristics found in the bands of Ellington, Basie, [Jimmie] Lunceford, Earl Hines. It was the charts mostly. And the kind of playing that Chick demanded -- the precision, the in-tune ensemble and section work."

"Chick Webb's standard of musicianship is far too low," critic John Hammond (who would, as a Columbia Records producer and executive, be instrumental in the careers of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Charlie Christian, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Pete Seeger, Leonard Cohen and Stevie Ray Vaughan) wrote in 1937. "On the stage Chick exhibits the best and worst in the band ... elaborate, badly written 'white' arrangements, a 'comedian' saxophonist .... But Chick is such a swell performer and Fitzgerald so great a personality that crowds usually overlook such deficiencies."

Maybe Webb hesitated because he thought teenaged Fitzgerald (who would be adopted by Webb and his wife) -- reputedly too rough-looking to be given a spotlight at the Apollo (if that version's true) -- might not have been the ideal visual centerpiece. (Some didn't find her pretty.) But he soon discovered something that would obliterate any objections he might have had: Fitzgerald was sort of a reverse Elvis Presley, appearing a couple of generations before rock 'n' roll. She was a black woman who didn't sound black.

She didn't sound necessarily white either. She just sounded like Ella.

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If there is a criticism to be made, it's that much of her early work with Webb consists of fluffy novelty songs. The material is nice and safe and goofy -- tracks like "McPherson Is Rehearsin'" and "Vote for Mr. Rhythm" haven't held up well. It's clear that at this point Webb thought of Fitzgerald as an added feature, rather than the driving force, of his band. It's to his credit that he soon sublimated his musical vision to hers.

Still, it was only after Webb's untimely death -- he was 34 when he died after surgery -- that Fitzgerald began to experiment with bebop-style improvisation. Inspired by Dizzy Gillespie, with whom she toured in 1943 (and again in 1947), Fitzgerald began to improvise wordless phrases over chord changes -- to genuinely scat.

And it wasn't until she hooked up with producer Norman Ganz at Verve that she became the iconic interpreter of the great American songbook, a singer -- and setter -- of standards. If you're looking toward the high end of American pop music, she's there alongside Sinatra, a real artist working in a medium that's deceptively accessible. She spans the not inconsiderable distance from big-band girl singer to the sort of Streisand-esque diva who can command Cole Porter and George Gershwin compositions, Harold Arlen art songs and The Beatles' "Can't Buy Me Love."

It's also true that she was more musician than vocal actor. While she was a fine interpreter of the great American songbook, her phrasing is always more conventional -- less alert to irony -- than someone like Sinatra or Holiday or, say, Nina Simone.

Fitzgerald didn't change your mind about what a song was about, she just sang it better. When she performed show tunes she tended to liberate them from the context of the shows. You might notice a certain naivete in some of her recordings. But despite her technical prowess, she was never less than warm, a human paragon.

While you might prefer another singer's version, there's always a feeling that Fitzgerald somehow got it right.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

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Style on 03/26/2017

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