ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, June 16, 1996 TAG: 9606170029
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: STEPHEN HOLDEN THE NEW YORK TIMES Note: above
SHE LEAVES a lasting imprint on jazz and an enormous body of unique musical recordings.
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 78.
She had been suffering from diabetes and its circulatory system complications for many years. In 1993, both of her legs were amputated below the knees.
A pre-eminent American singer who brought a classic sense of musical proportion and balance to everything she touched, 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 hailed her as having ``the best ear of any singer ever.'' Until the 1970s, when physical problems began to impinge on her perfect technique, she seemed to loom as an immutable creative force in the musical world.
In a career that spanned more than six decades, 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, Fitzgerald communicated a wistful, sweet-natured compassion for the heartache she described. Where Holiday and Frank Sinatra lived out the dramas they sang about, Fitzgerald, viewing them from afar, seemed to understand and forgive all. Her apparent equanimity made hers a voice of profound reassurance and hope.
Over the decades, 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.
She 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, 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, Va. 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.
As a child, Fitzgerald dreamed of being a dancer. But she also sang and was attracted to the recordings of Louis Armstrong 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.''
As a teen-ager, Miss Fitzgerald developed a dance routine with a friend, Charles Gulliver, which they performed in local clubs. Then
In 1932, her mother died suddenly, and she went to live with an aunt in Harlem.
On Nov. 21, 1934, she made her stage debut in an amateur contest at the Apollo Theater, singing two songs, ``The Object of My Affection'' and ``Judy,'' in the style of Connee Boswell. She won first prize.
She caught the attention of Chick Webb, the bandleader and drummer, who was reluctant to sign her to a contract because she was gawky and unkempt, a ``diamond in the rough,'' as the bandleader Mario Bauza later remembered. But the audience's reaction to her performances persuaded him to offer her a job, and during the Webb band's residency at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, her reputation blossomed.
``I thought my singing was pretty much hollering,'' she recalled many years later, ``but Webb didn't.''
Fitzgerald made her first recording in 1935 (``Love and Kisses,'' with Chick Webb), and had her first hit with ``A Tisket, A-Tasket,'' a song she helped write, adapting the lyric, she later explained, from ``that old drop-the-handkerchief game I played from 6 to 7 years old on up.'' The song was a popular sensation and made her a star. After Webb died in 1939, the young singer was the band's nominal leader until mid-1942, when it broke up. Between her recording debut in 1935 and the demise of the band seven years later, Fitzgerald recorded almost 150 sides, the majority of them novelties and disposable pop fluff.
During this period, she married Benjamin Kornegay, a shipyard worker and petty thief with a criminal record. The marriage ended in annulment after two years. The singer was 30 when she fell in love with the bassist Ray Brown while they were on tour with Dizzy Gillespie's band. They were married in December 1947, set up housekeeping in East Elmhurst, N.Y., and adopted the son of Miss Fitzgerald's half-sister, Frances. They named the boy Ray Jr. While Miss Fitzgerald concentrated on her career, her son was cared for by her aunt Virginia. The marriage became a casualty of conflicting career schedules, and they were divorced in 1953.
As early as 1942 and '43, Fitzgerald began to be influenced by the experiments of such be-bop instrumentalists as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. She incorporated elements of be-bop rhythm and harmony into her singing, and while on tour with the Gillespie band in 1946, she embraced the music wholeheartedly. A year earlier, she had recorded what would become one of the most influential vocal jazz records of the decade, a version of ``Flying Home'' in which she indulged extensively in the phonetic improvisation known as scat. Where other singers, most notably Louis Armstrong, had tried similar improvisation, no one before Fitzgerald employed the technique with such dazzling inventiveness. Two years later, when Decca released her sensational be-bop version of ``Lady Be Good,'' Downbeat magazine proclaimed her ``as great a master of bop as she has been of swing.''
These achievements were among the high points of a recording career that found Miss Fitzgerald recording in all manner of pop settings. Between 1935 and 1955 she recorded for Decca Records. Under the commercially astute supervision of the producer Milt Gabler, she was teamed with the vocal group the Ink Spots for several hits, including the million-selling ``I'm Making Believe'' and ``Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall.'' She also scored commercially with novelty duets recorded with Louis Jordan, the most popular of which was ``Stone Cold Dead in the Market.''
Dictated largely by the fads of the moment, Miss Fitzgerald's pre-1955 pop recording career was an artistically mixed bag and stood distinct from her work as a swing and jazz singer in nightclubs. One of the artistic high points of the Decca years was a 10-inch long-playing record, ``Ella Sings Gershwin,'' which she recorded with the pianist Ellis Larkins in 1950.
Miss
Fitzgerald's life changed when Norman Granz, the impresario of the popular Jazz at the Philharmonic series, invited her to join the touring jam sessions in 1949. One of her most popular numbers, ``How High the Moon,'' became the unofficial signature tune of the series. The relationship developed into one of the most productive artist-manager partnerships in the history of jazz.When Fitzgerald's contract with Decca expired, she became the first artist Granz signed to his new Verve label. It was under his supervision that she undertook the series of landmark ``Songbook'' albums that brought her voice to a large nonjazz audience.
``I had gotten to the point where I was only singing be-bop,'' she later recalled. ``I thought be-bop was `it,' and that all I had to do was go someplace and sing bop. But it finally got to the point where I had no place to sing. I realized then that there was more to music than bop. Norman came along, and he felt that I should do other things, so he produced `The Cole Porter Songbook' with me. It was a turning point in my life.''
``Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook'' became the prototype for a series of anthologies recorded over more than a decade and focusing on individual composers or composing teams, blending familiar standards and lesser-known, usually first-rate songs. Backed by various studio orchestras she also interpreted the work of Irving Berlin, Harold Arlen, Duke Ellington, the Gershwins, Jerome Kern, Johnny Mercer, and Rodgers and Hart. ``Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Songbook,'' a 53-song, five LP-collection recorded with the arranger and conductor Nelson Riddle in 1959, is widely regarded as the greatest of these collections.
These albums were among the first pop records to devote such serious attention to individual songwriters, and they were instrumental in establishing the pop album as a vehicle for serious musical exploration.
After 1955 through the mid-1960s, Fitzgerald concentrated on material that was almost consistently commensurate with her artistry, and her career soared. She made her first feature film appearance in ``Pete Kelly's Blues'' in 1955, and in 1957 presented her own concert at the Hollywood Bowl. In April 1958, she gave a Carnegie Hall concert with Duke Ellington to celebrate the release of her four-LP set, ``Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Songbook.''
A workhorse who toured 40 to 45 weeks each year, Fitzgerald showed the first signs of fatigue when she nearly collapsed on stage in Munich in 1965. In 1967, Granz moved her to Capitol where her producer Dave Dexter promised to give her ``a totally different sound.'' These albums - a religious record, an album of country music and a Christmas collection - found her on the wrong musical track.
Signed to Reprise in 1969, Fitzgerald tried singing contemporary hits by the Beatles, Burt Bacharach and Marvin Gaye, but rock and soul proved almost as uncongenial to her style as had country.
She went back on track when Granz founded his jazz label, Pablo, in 1973.
But from the early 1970s, Fitzgerald began to have eyesight problems complicated by diabetes, and in 1986, she had open heart surgery. She returned to the concert stage the following year, when she was awarded the National Medal of Arts. Despite ill health, she continued to perform at least once month into the early 1990s. Although her quality of voice declined steadily from the early 1970s, even at the end of her career, her singing retained a remarkable rhythmic acuity.
Offstage, Miss Fitzgerald lived a quiet self-protective life in a 13-room home in Beverly Hills. Her social life comprised a small circle of old friends, including members of the Count Basie and Duke Ellington orchestras, and other singers, including singers like Carmen McRae, Sarah Vaughan and Peggy Lee. A model of abstemious self-discipline, shunning cigarettes and liquor, Miss Fitzgerald was also a person of few words. Shy and extremely sensitive to criticism, she preferred to let Granz do most of the talking for her.
Asked once about her feelings about being ``a legend,'' she replied: ``I don't think I noticed it at first. But when Norman Granz and I began recording the `songbook' series in the mid-50s, it just seemed that more people began to like my singing. The awards I started winning didn't make me feel important, but they made me realize people loved me. and then when kids started calling me `Ella' - half of them never even mentioned `Ella Fitzgerald' - just `Ella.'
She amassed countless awards and commendations, including honorary docorates at Yale and Dartmouth, and 13 Grammy Awards, including one for Lifetime Achievement, in 1967. In 1979 she was given a Kennedy Center Award for her work in the performing arts.
Accepting an honorary doctorate of music at Yale, she commented with her characteristic modesty, ``Not bad for someone who only studied music to get that half credit in high school.''
She is survived by her son, Ray Brown Jr., and a grandchild.|
LENGTH: Long : 211 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP file/1991 Ella Fitzgerald, the "First Lady of Song,"by CNBdied at her home in Beverly Hills, Calif., on Saturday. Color.