Word: ella
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...sing like I feel," Ella Fitzgerald would say. By that casual standard, it was a wonderful life. She sang some of the best music ever written in America, and, feeling it, she sang it wonderfully. For many, indeed, she sang it definitively. "I never knew how good our songs were," Ira Gershwin once remarked, "until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them." By the time she died at home in Beverly Hills last week at 78, she had spread the treasure of her voice over thousands of songs and half a dozen generations, cutting everyone in on the wonder. There...
...beat of her music, which--young fans in Italy to the contrary--was less straight jazz than pop on an elegant upswing. There is no doubt that Billie Holiday had a darker genius. Lady Day's jazz was steeped in the magic and mystery and doom of the blues. Ella's art had a sunnier side, a more adaptive quality that let her be, if not an absolute original, a peerless interpreter, a superb vocal actress who could snuggle into Porter's playfulness or Arlen's melodrama or Ellington's chromatic gymnastics with equal agility. Billie Holiday's music...
Born in Newport News, Virginia, Ella Fitzgerald never knew her biological father. According to a biographer, she was raised in Yonkers, New York, and fled her abusive stepfather after her mother died, making money by singing and dancing on the sidewalks of Harlem and warning prostitutes of the arrival of the police. At 16, dressed in cast-off clothes and wearing men's boots, she won an amateur-night contest at the Apollo Theater. When she was brought to Chick Webb's attention, he complained, "I don't want that old ugly thing!" But he took her. As admirers would...
...ballad performances that pushed past the pristine technical perfection of her pitch and phrasing into the night country. As a personality, she was remote, needing music to give her substance. As a performer, even to someone hearing her for the first time, she was an old friend. Talk about Ella or Billie, and no further I.D. is required. "It used to bother me when people I didn't know came up and called me Ella," she admitted once. "It seemed to me they should say Miss Fitzgerald, but somehow they never...
...immediate concerns, they do not revolve around becoming the next Emma Thompson. Last week Tyler became a godmother to Ella Rose Richards, granddaughter of Keith, whom she knows through her family. And after months working in California. she is eager to spend some down time "with myself" in New York City. "I can't wait for someone to honk at me and tell me to f--- off," she says, "to be just one out of a million." Fat chance...