THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 16, 1996 TAG: 9606160024
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: FROM WIRE REPORTS
LENGTH: 96 lines
Ella Fitzgerald, whose sweet, silvery voice and endlessly inventive vocal improvisations made her the most celebrated jazz singer of her generation, died Saturday at home in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 79.
Miss Fitzgerald, who was born in Newport News, had been suffering from diabetes and its circulatory system complications for many years. In 1993, both of her legs were amputated below the knees.
She died peacefully at her home, surrounded by family and friends, spokeswoman Andrea Hecht said, while declining to reveal the cause of her death. ``She was a very private person, and her family would want us to respect that,'' Hecht said.
A 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. Musicians from Bing Crosby to Benny Goodman, when asked to name their favorite singer, cited Ella Fitzgerald.
``Man, woman or child, Ella is the greatest,'' Crosby once said. Mel Torme had hailed her as having ``the best ear of any singer ever.''
Until the 1970s, when physical problems began to impinge on her perfect technique, Miss Fitzgerald seemed to loom as an immutable creative force in a musical world where everything else was crumbling.
In a career that spanned more than six decades, Miss Fitzgerald stood above the emotional fray of the scores of popular standards she performed. Stylistically she was the polar opposite of her equally legendary peer, Billie Holiday, who conveyed a wounded vulnerability. Even when handed a sad song, Miss Fitzgerald communicated a wistful, sweet-natured compassion for the heartache she described. Where Holiday and Frank Sinatra lived out the dramas they sang about, Miss Fitzgerald, viewing them from afar, seemed to understand and forgive all.
Her apparent equanimity and her clear pronunciation, which transcended race, ethnicity, class, and age, made her a voice of profound reassurance and hope.
Over the decades, Miss Fitzgerald performed with big bands, symphony orchestras and small jazz groups. 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). 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.
Miss Fitzgerald was renowned both for her delicately rendered ballads and her pyrotechnical displays of scat improvisation. (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. 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.
During her long career, Miss Fitzgerald recorded with Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Louis Armstrong. 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.
``I never knew how good our songs were,'' Ira Gershwin once said, ``until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them.''
Although most biographies give her birthdate as 1918, her birth certificate and school records show her to have been born a year earlier, on April 25, 1917, in Newport News. She was the product of a common-law marriage between William Fitzgerald and Temperance Williams Fitzgerald. The couple separated within a year of her birth, and with her mother and a Portuguese immigrant named Joseph Da Silva, she moved to Yonkers, N.Y.
As a child, Miss Fitzgerald dreamed of being a dancer. But she also sang and was attracted to the recordings of Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby and the Boswell Sisters, in particular the group's lead singer, Connee Boswell.
``My mother brought home one of her records, and I fell in love with it,'' she recalled many years later. ``I tried so hard to sound just like her.''
In 1934, she won an amateur contest at the famed Apollo Theater in Harlem, catching the attention of drummer and bandleader Chick Webb.
He hired her to sing at a 1935 Yale dance, saying, ``If the kids like her, she stays.''
The kids loved her. Back at Yale for an honorary degree in 1986, she commented with characteristic modesty, ``Not bad for someone who only studied music to get that half credit in high school.''
She amassed countless other awards and commendations, including 13 Grammy Awards. One was for Lifetime Achievement, in 1967. She won Downbeat magazine's best female jazz singer poll for 18 consecutive years. In 1979 she was given a Kennedy Center Award for her work in the performing arts.
She is survived by her son, Ray Brown Jr., and a grandchild. MEMO: This story was compiled from reports by The New York Times and The
Associated Press. ILLUSTRATION: B\W photos
Throughout the 1930s, left, 1950s, center, and 1960s, right, Ella
Fitzgerald stirred listeners with her way of singing even sad songs
with wistful, sweet-natured compassion.
KEYWORDS: DEATH OBITUARY by CNB