Word: ella
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...appointment to the Crimson Future Committee (CFC), a prestigious, interdisciplinary group whose members are paving the way towards Harvard's financial security in the twenty-first century. All appears to be well with the CFC--that is, until Nikki stumbles over the dead body of Law School committee member Ella Fisher after a late meeting in Littauer on a rainy night. A black woman herself, Ella's rags-to-riches rise in the university administration was received with mixed feelings in the academic community. But who would possibly want to murder her? Leave it to Nikki to find...
Perhaps no one employed this strategy with more profound results than the incomparable Billie Holiday, who paved the way for an entire generation of black women vocal stylists, including Carmen McRae, Ella Fitzgerald and R.-and-B. singers like Aretha Franklin. Although Holiday, who counted Bessie Smith among her most important musical influences, was not a blues singer per se, her music was deeply rooted in the blues tradition. As a jazz musician working primarily with the idiom of white popular song, Holiday used the blues tradition to inject suggestions of perspectives more complicated than those the lyrics themselves contained...
...their featured improvisers took direction from him, and every school of jazz since has had to address how he interpreted the basics of the idiom--swing, blues, ballads and Afro-Hispanic rhythms. While every jazz instrumentalist owes him an enormous debt, singers as different as Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and Marvin Gaye have Armstrong in common as well. His freedom, his wit, his discipline, his bawdiness, his majesty and his irrepressible willingness to do battle with deep sorrow and the wages of death give his music a perpetual position in the wave...
Those of the Old Guard didn't have to work that hard. The shadow they cast was longer, warmer; they wore their classicism so easily. Unburdened by having to make each new piece an artistic event, they simply refined and perfected their gifts. Crosby, Ella, Cary Grant--these people had lasting appeal...
...Yeah!" said Ella...