Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song

"Like all of these books I’ve chosen, it’s a life in the context of the times and a musical life in the context of the music. Like Britten, we don’t know everything about Ella Fitzgerald. We’re not even sure how many times she was married. That’s extraordinary, given how famous she is and was in her lifetime. With Billie Holiday, who was Ella’s contemporary, we feel we know everything about her life, you can sort of hear it in her singing. One of the things we could say if you compare the two—and it’s always tempting—is that you are always aware, with Billie Holiday, of her blackness, and not just when she sang “Strange Fruit”. With Ella Fitzgerald, it was possible for her fans to be oblivious to her race. In their minds, she had transcended it. It was partly the way in which she was presented and the work she did with the Great American Songbook. In the mid-1950s, she started recording Cole Porter, George Gershwin and Harold Arlen and all of those great 20th-century composers of American pop songs. In a way, she was providing the definitive versions of many of those songs. They came out as albums, in some cases with three LPs in them. For instance, there’s the Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Song Book . She made herself an authority on them. What we do know of her life is partly at odds with that but, also, I think the details are scant because she wanted them that way. This is a problem for Judith Tick, writing a biography of somebody who was intensely private and deliberately didn’t let out details. Tick discovers things that had not been known before but is still guessing about others. She’s very diligent as a biographer. She won’t claim things that she doesn’t have evidence for. For example, there’s a suggestion that Ella was maybe abused as a child, but this is based on one occasion when she said something to a relative. Tick tells us that, but she doesn’t make a big thing of it, because there isn’t enough evidence. You need more to go on than a chance remark. That’s typical of her general approach to writing this biography. Having said that, she has access to an enormous amount of material regarding the concerts and the recordings. You get chapter and verse about what Ella sang on which occasion, how she put together her repertoire, and how she turned the voice into a jazz instrument. When Ella started out singing with dance bands, the singer’s job was to sit there and stand up at some point and sing a chorus, before sitting down again. It was the singer’s job to remind the listener what the song was and what the words were but it was the sax players and trumpeters who did the jazz. Through her career, Ella changed that. She didn’t do it singlehandedly, because Billie Holiday did it too, but it was Ella more than anybody else. She did it partly by teaming up with beboppers like Dizzy Gillespie, where you didn’t really use the words, you scatted instead; and so her voice became an instrument. One of the things that I like so much about Tick’s book, which only came out in 2023, is the way in which she is able to take the details that we have of Ella Fitzgerald’s life and apply them to the art. The subtitle, “The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song”, is really important because that’s what she shows in the book. Ella Fitzgerald was able to reinvent the role of the singer in jazz and turn it into something which was not a poor relation to the horn players, but an absolute equal. Ella knew what she wanted. She was a band leader as well. She had a tremendous musical brain."