Word: ella
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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...
...Yeah!" said Ella...
When Chase stumbles upon the body of Ella Fisher, a black dean, dead from an apparent fall, she's sure that the wrong kind of invisible hand is at work. She investigates the victim's death with two weapons: an analytical mind and an unabashed use of her feminine wiles. Flattering and flirting, she makes her way through the suspects: the playboy university president who promoted Fisher from the secretarial ranks, allegedly thanks to her talents between the sheets; a slimy comptroller with a repertoire of bilingual--but still awful--come-ons (as in, "You're looking recherche this evening...
...mind to begin my account upon the first occasion when I truly knew where things stood with me, that is, that afternoon of the day my father, Arthur Harkness, was taken to the Quincy graveyard and buried between my mother, Cora Mary Harkness, and his first wife, Ella Harkness...