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In 1988, I attended Ella Fitzgerald's 70th birthday concert at Carnegie Hall. It was the only time I've witnessed someone receive a standing ovation just for walking out on stage, such was the esteem in which that well-heeled audience held her.
Ella, who was born in 1917, had recently been ill, in and out of hospital with heart problems, and was already having trouble with her legs because of diabetes.
A stool was provided for her to sit on, but in a long set she never once used it. At first, she seemed tired, but the longer she sang, the livelier she became.
A highlight of the evening was Billie Holiday's God Bless the Child sung in perfect imitation of Billie's voice, a tribute from one great jazz singer to another.
First lady of song
It's easy to forget that Ella, who died 21 years ago, was first and last a jazz singer.
The Song Book project she undertook for Norman Granz's Verve label between 1956 and 1964 tended to eclipse her jazz credentials.
According to author and biographer James Gavin, the Song Book albums were prestige items in American households in the late 1950s and early 60s.
"Those albums are almost like bibles in a way," Gavin said.
"They were beautifully packaged; they employed the greatest arrangers, the greatest musicians of the day; and they glorified the great American song book in a way that few singers had done before. They are still considered to be definitive."
Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern and Johnny Mercer: it's a list that encapsulates most of the great names of American song writing from the mid-20th century.
Together with band leaders Buddy Bregman, Billy May, Paul Weston and Nelson Riddle, Ella made recordings that are always clear, bright and stylish, her diction impeccable — you could write the lyrics down from her singing.
If I have a small criticism of the series, it's that sometimes she was a little too respectful of the material, but, you could argue, that if Cole Porter and Irving Berlin don't inspire respect, what song writer does?
The exception was the Duke Ellington set. Ellington was the one real jazz composer on the list and together with his own orchestra, he and Ella swing like mad.
On Cottontail, for instance, Ella scats away — admittedly there never was much a of a lyric for this song — in the company of solos from saxophonist Ben Webster, violinist Stuff Smith and guitarist Barney Kessel.
It's a useful corrective to the song books as a whole.
No one could scat like Ella
Ella Fitzgerald might not have invented the style of wordless singing — by the time she recorded Oh Lady Be Good in 1947, jazz singers had been scatting for more than two decades — but as James Gavin points out, this was the first great bebop vocal.
"1945 was the first year bebop exploded on the New York scene, and Ella, who had been a swing singer up until that time, had bigger ears than anyone had understood.
She was surrounded by musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker and she was absorbing what they did like a sponge. This was a completely new language at that time."
Ella's vocal on Oh Lady Be Good is, according to Gavin, a masterpiece.
"It could have been played by any of the great bebop saxophonists of that time, except Ella was singing it and she was one of the very first singers to be able to do that," he said.
Forty-one years later in Carnegie Hall, she was still doing it, her technique — the product of those big ears — long since honed to perfection, her audience ever more grateful as the evening continued.
At the end, there was a second standing ovation.
Topics: music, arts-and-entertainment, music-industry, united-states
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