Why I Like Ella Fitzgerald

When my partner, Eric, and I first met in the early nineties, a great appreciation for the music of Ella Fitzgerald was one of the things that united us.  

Ella Jane Fitzgerald (1917-1996) was born in Newport News, Virginia, and spent most of her tumultuous childhood and adolescence in Yonkers, New York, later in Harlem.  For her first few years she wanted to be a dancer, like her idols were. That ended, thankfully, when she won an amateur award for singing at the Apollo theater at the tender age of seventeen. She became the lead singer in Chick Webb’s band, and became the de facto leader of that band when the handicapped Webb died in 1939.  She later went on to have a big hit with her jazz interpretation of the nursery rhyme “A Tisket, a Tasket.”  I have nothing but gratitude toward Norman Granz, who thought her voice would work well with the many Tin Pan Alley standards that existed then, by the likes of George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, and Duke Ellington. To say he was right is a major understatement.

Here’s where I say why I love her. And part of it is the standard stuff.

First, the natural musicianship: she was perfect in her timing, phrasing, and hitting the right note. She couldn’t sight-read,  and I don’t believe she ever took a class. She didn’t need to. She had, internally all that stuff that usually has to be taught to music majors.

Second: the instrument. I’ll just say it: Her voice is instantly recognizable. Like Frank Sinatra, Maria Callas, or Fairouz, no one else sounds remotely like her. Eric and I are constantly recognizing her voice whenever it arises. When it was at last discovered that she was born with a great internal instrument, she accepted it, almost with a little embarrassment, like she was unworthy of it. It should have happened to another girl.  And one of the features of this great instrument, like that of the English contralto Kathleen Ferrier, was that her voice, having started so beautifully in the easy part, actually got stronger in the hard part. Made surer, smoother, happier in the difficulty. We weren’t expecting that. We expected her to fail on the hard part. We were prepared to be compassionate. But we didn’t need to be, it turned out.

Third: I’m here to talk of something that isn’t often said out loud. That is, the lyrics she sang. The Tin Pan Alley standards were generally about our shared toothache, love.

She was what was once considered unlucky in love. Never conventionally pretty, she often worried about her weight. She was married twice but neither of them “took” like they were expected to. So her singing, mostly about love, we must admit, always had the quality of reporting on love—even the painful parts— by someone who didn’t actually experience it.  She rather ran a sort of  reconnaissance. She often sang like a little girl. A little girl whose mission was to report to us on the hard parts of love. So we wouldn’t have to go there ourselves.

I think it was Irving Berlin who said, ”I didn’t know my songs were so good until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them.”