Becoming Ella Fitzgerald by Judith Tick - A Review by Eric Felten

 

‘Becoming Ella Fitzgerald’ Review: The Queen of Jazz

Cannily switching gears from a sweet-voiced ‘thrush’ to a swinging bandleader, Fitzgerald battled the doubts of her peers and her own stage fright.

By Eric Felten

Dec. 22, 2023

“In early 1933, a 15-year-old Ella Fitzgerald spent many a day dancing for dimes and nickels on the sidewalks of Yonkers, N.Y. At least she did until a truant officer caught her and hauled her to Westchester County children’s court, where she was sentenced to five years at the New York State Training School for Girls. In “Becoming Ella Fitzgerald,” Judith Tick, a professor emerita of music history at Northeastern University, writes that Ella—though miserable at what was effectively incarceration at a reform school—“received some decent instruction there,” including singing, piano and harmony.

But she didn’t do the whole stretch of her sentence. By the following year she was free again and kept herself afloat by singing and dancing at rent parties. Some friends put her up for a talent-show competition, the Harlem Amateur Hour, held at the Apollo Theater and carried by more than 20 radio stations across the country.

Ms. Tick’s thoughtful and thorough biography traces Fitzgerald’s career from her near-fail at the Apollo to a career in which even the real failures proved to be successes. The author also makes it possible to trace the singer through the vast variety of songs she sang, songs that not only defined Fitzgerald’s career but which came to define what it is to be a jazz singer.

‘Judy’

At the Apollo Theatre on Nov. 21, 1934, Ella had planned to sing while she danced, or perhaps dance while she sang. But a late addition to the contest were polished professional dancers—the Edwards Sisters—that took the stage before her. “I knew I could not follow them,” Fitzgerald would tell an interviewer years later. So, Ms. Tick writes, she decided to fall back on her “other, lesser talent (in her eyes): singing.”

Even that looked likely to be a disaster. Skittish and anxious, stricken with stage fright, Ella stumbled partway through “Judy,” a Hoagy Carmichael tune from the late ’20s with recently added lyrics. The audience was not impressed. “They didn’t boo immediately,” recalled Ralph Cooper, the master of ceremonies, but there were ugly grumblings. Cooper ran out and grabbed the microphone to quell the crowd. “Folks, hold on now,” he said. “This young lady’s got a gift she’d like to share with us tonight. She’s just having a little trouble getting it out of its wrapper.” He said a few words of encouragement to the nervous contestant and then appealed to the audience: “Let’s give her a second chance.”

Rescued from imminent humiliation, Ella let loose and sang. By the time she was finished, she was done with notions of becoming a dancer. “But the real breakthrough that evening,” Ms. Tick suggests, was one that “transcended the issue of song versus dance.” It created in Fitzgerald a desire—a need, even—to please her audience. It was a need that would lead to a strange anxiety, a relentless worry that, over her decades long career, she would never shake: Did the crowd enjoy the show? Did they like her? “It was the turning point in my life,” Fitzgerald later reflected about her debut at the Apollo. “Once up there, I felt acceptance, and love from the audience—I knew I wanted to sing before people the rest of my life.”

Success at the Apollo didn’t exactly launch her career. But it led to some opportunities to sing at less-prominent music halls. She auditioned for Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra and for the powerful young producer John Hammond. Neither was impressed. It didn’t help that Hammond was a committed advocate for Billie Holiday. He dismissed Fitzgerald as lacking “uniqueness.”

The drummer and bandleader Chick Webb wasn’t interested in adding a girl singer to his show, according to Ms. Tick. Webb’s was a hard-swinging big band that packed acrobatic jitterbugs into dance halls such as the Savoy. The dulcet warbling of a “thrush” (contemporary slang for female vocalists), many felt, was more suited for sweet orchestras in hotel ballrooms. And so Fitzgerald could have been forgiven for having less than great expectations when, on March 6, 1935, she was taken to sing for Webb. She had to sneak backstage, led by Bardu Ali, a showman who did the announcing for Webb. “I don’t want no girl singer,” Webb said, according to Fitzgerald’s later recollection. But Ali insisted that Webb give her a chance. She was standing right there, after all. How long would it take to hear her? Two minutes—which is what Webb grudgingly allowed.

Later that week, Webb played a dance at Yale. The band featured a new singer.

‘A-Tisket, A-Tasket’

Performing with Webb’s band, Ella sang sweet ballads, swing songs and novelties. Ms. Tick writes that Ella used her feet as well as her voice, despite her earlier decision to keep her singing front and center. According to Ms. Tick, “Ella was coming into her own as a performer for her lovely mix of singing and dancing.”

In 1938, as the American band business was approaching peak swing, Fitzgerald tried her hand at songwriting, working up a sort of nursery-jingle in swing time. She faced no small amount of pushback. According to Ms. Tick, the arranger assigned to write Fitzgerald’s band backings tried to put off scoring the song. The studio engineer didn’t want to waste time recording it. The owner of the Apollo refused to let her sing it. “What the hell kind of a song is that?” Ms. Tick quotes him as saying. “What the hell are we running, a kindergarten?” But the result, “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” was a sensation. It combined the catchy cadence of a children’s song with references to popular jitterbug moves such as pecking and trucking. Her song’s popularity shot Fitzgerald from Chick Webb’s girl-singer to a celebrity who enjoyed equal billing with the band’s leader.

During Fitzgerald’s tenure with Webb, the drummer was in precipitous physical decline. The spinal tuberculosis that had plagued him since childhood landed him in hospitals repeatedly. In June 1939 he died. The new leader of the band? Ella Fitzgerald.

‘Oh, Lady, Be Good!’

After World War II, the big bands began to collapse and crumble. In this new musical environment, Fitzgerald embraced the postwar vogue for bebop that had been made popular by Dizzy Gillespie. But what did that mean for a singer? There would be riff tunes and novelties, such as Gillespie’s “Oop Bop Sh’bam.” But for the most part, bebop was as unfriendly to singing as it was to dancing. The drummer Max Roach once explained that, in bebop, “the spotlight [is] on instrumentalists.” Fitzgerald devised an extraordinary, virtuosic way of singing as if she were an instrumentalist herself. Scat singing, as it is called, wasn’t altogether new—Louis Armstrong was known to sing melodic phrases wordlessly; his recordings of “Dinah” in the early 1930s are revelations of what can be done belting out hot jazz without lyrics.

Fitzgerald combined the Armstrong trope with the fractured harmonies of bebop jam sessions and applied it to “Oh, Lady, Be Good!” a George and Ira Gershwin tune that had long been a vehicle for swing-era sessions. As Ms. Tick recounts, Fitzgerald and Gillespie had been friends for years. On tour with the trumpeter in 1946, she listened to Gillespie nightly and had the chance to become fluent in the vocabulary of bebop—the breakneck tempos, the pungent dissonance. Steeped in the new sound, she applied a vocal version of it to “Oh, Lady, Be Good!” She unfurled chorus after chorus of impossibly inventive vocal gymnastics, creating a thrilling new way of singing. Or at least it was thrilling when Fitzgerald did it. She is the rare singer who is worth listening to scat, transcending an idiom that, in lesser voices, is usually as tiresome as it is treacherous.

‘It’s De-lovely’

Based solely on “Oh, Lady, Be Good!” or “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” one would be hard pressed to imagine Fitzgerald as one of the great interpreters of show tunes. But for all the nursery novelties and frantic bebop, she liked what she called “pretty songs”—what is now known as the Great American Songbook. There was a notion among some—including Cole Porter himself—that sophisticated songs from the stage were beyond Fitzgerald’s experience. According to one Porter biographer whom Ms. Tick quotes, the composer “rather snobbishly doubted that Ella could make any sense of the allusions to the monde in his lyrics.” But Fitzgerald proved more than capable of delivering double entendres and other Porterian wordplay in such songs as “It’s De-lovely”; her unfussy approach to singing sophisticated songs was anything but “the Tin-Pan-tithesis of melody.” Porter would later tell Fitzgerald’s producer, Norman Granz, that Fitzgerald’s album of his songs was “the finest he had ever heard.”

To the extent many listeners now know Porter’s music, it is through Fitzgerald’s recordings. Would we still recognize songs such as “Always True to You in My Fashion” had Fitzgerald not made them indelible? She turned them into acid tests of cultural savoir-faire. What does a “Harris pat” mean? No small number know the answer: A Paris hat. That’s Fitzgerald’s doing.

‘Mack the Knife’

In 1956, Armstrong recorded a “murder ballad” from a Weimar-era “play with music.” The words, translated from Bertolt Brecht’s German lyric, told of a switch-blade-wielding killer named Mack the Knife. It was an unexpected hit. But Satchmo’s success with the song was nothing compared with Bobby Darin’s. Complete with swinging interjections of “babe,” “un-huh” and “eek!,” Darin’s 1959 parody of Rat Pack sensibilities sat atop the charts for weeks.

Fitzgerald thought “Mack” would be perfect for her 1960 Berlin concert. But, exhausted from the hard miles her European tour demanded, she was too worn out to learn the song in time and scratched it from the set list. Or so her band thought, Ms. Tick tells us. “When Ella turns around and says, ‘Let’s do “Mack the Knife,” ’ my heart sank,” Ms. Tick quotes her bass player Wilfred Middlebrooks as saying. “We were in front of too many people to try something crazy, and I knew Ella didn’t know the tune.”

A few choruses into the song, Fitzgerald lost the string of the lyric. But she still proved Middlebrooks wrong. They weren’t in front of too many people to have risked playing the song. The size of the crowd created the critical mass for what happened next: Fitzgerald laughed; she improvised on the spot; she did a broad imitation of Armstrong. The worriers waited for the audience to turn on Fitzgerald, but instead there came washing up over the stage, according to the German concert promoter Fritz Rau, a “neverending thunderous applause.” In the shadowy days of the Cold War, when truth was hard to come by, Fitzgerald gave her audience the thing they most wanted—honesty. The LP produced from that night’s performance would stay on the Billboard charts for a year.

‘Can’t Buy Me Love’

Early in her career, Fitzgerald’s need to be liked was common enough among entertainers. After the war, the flag-waving showiness of the swing era gave way to the ascetic aesthetic of modern jazz. Artists were expected to be committed to their art, not their audience. Not Fitzgerald. She did her best to please her audience, as Ms. Tick points out, whether that was with novelty tunes or the popular songs of the day. Many if not most jazz musicians were aggravated and nonplussed when the Beatles upended the music business. Fitzgerald found a way to swing the Fab Four, producing covers of “Can’t Buy Me Love” and “A Hard Day’s Night” that were credible as big-band jazz and true to the energetic originals.

But who was Ella Fitzgerald? The girl with the cutesy-wootsy nursery rhymes, or the Great American Songstress with the vicuña voice, impeccable diction and impossibly perfect intonation? The swing stalwart harmonizing in an easy groove with Louis Armstrong, or the ferocious bebopper tearing through the chord changes with Dizzy Gillespie? The crowd-pleaser whose career was launched by pleasing a hard-to-please crowd, or simply all of the above?

Ms. Tick draws a picture of an idol who, regardless of the joy she gave, suffered from the neurotic notion that the crowds, like that first audience at the Apollo, could not be counted on to like her or her music. The author quotes the broadcaster Hans Ruland, who interviewed Fitzgerald late in her life. Ruland marveled at “how lonely a person can be who is worshipped by millions. And how dependent the stars are on their audience.” The jazz singer who was arguably the greatest was also the most grateful.”

Mr. Felten is a writer and jazz musician in Washington, D.C.

Appeared in the December 23, 2023, print edition.