Ella Fitzgerald - The Virtuoso

Ella Fitzgerald was an American jazz singer who became world famous for the wide range and rare sweetness of her voice. She became an international legend during a career that spanned some six decades. She is perhaps most well-known now for her beautiful renditions of jazz standards and ballads, but she generated a phenomenal energy in her live performances, especially when "Scat Singing".

Ella Fitzgerald (April 25 1917 - June 16 1996)

Scat singing (also referred to simply as "Scat") is a jazz vocal style using emotive, onomatopoeic and nonsense syllables instead of words in melodic improvisation. It gives the vocalist the possibility to sound like a variety of different instruments. Scat has dim antecedents in the West African practice of assigning fixed syllables to percussion patterns, but the style was made popular by trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong from around 1927. 

Listen to these epic live performances from Ella Fitzgerald:

1966 "How High the Moon":

DHM YouTube Playlist

One Note Samba written by Tom Jobim (see our Bossa Nova post): 

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1969: 

DHM YouTube Playlist

Ella Fitzgerald

As a child, Fitzgerald wanted to be a dancer, but when she panicked at an amateur contest in 1934 at New York City's Apollo Theatre and sang in jazz style influenced by Connee Boswell instead, she won first prize. The following year Fitzgerald joined the Chick Webb orchestra. 

Webb became the Fitzgerald's guardian when her mother died. She made her first recording (aged 18) "Love and Kisses" and her first hit, "A Tisket, A-Tasket," followed in 1938. After Webb's death in 1939, she led his band until it broke up in 1942. She then soloed in cabarets and theatres and toured internationally with stars such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie as well as recording prolifically (It Don't Mean a Thing with Duke Ellington). 

"I owe Marilyn Monroe a real debt...It was because of her that I played it Mocambo, a very popular nightclub in the '50s. She personally called the owner of the Mocambo and told him she wanted me booked immediately, and if he would do it, she would take a front table every night, She told him - and it was true, due to Marilyn's superstar status - that the press would go wild. The owner said yes, and Marilyn was there, front table, every night. The press went overboard. After that, I never had to play a small jazz club again. She was an unusual woman - a little ahead of her times. And she didn't know it." 

- Ella Fitzgerald

Ella Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe at the Mocambo

During the 1970s she began to experience serious health problems, but she continued to perform, even after heart surgery in 1986. In 1993, however, her career was cut short following complications from diabetes, which resulted in the amputation of both her legs below the knees. 

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica, ellafitzgerald.com