Word: fitzgeralded
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Together--and often working with the brilliant arranging skills of Nelson Riddle--Fitzgerald and Granz then went on to songbooks for the likes of Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Duke Ellington, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Irving Berlin and Johnny Mercer, the great composers of the great era of American popular music. Those songbooks became the foundation of a legacy, the single source for a musical standard that Fitzgerald, as much as anyone, helped make timeless. "Some kids in Italy call me 'Mama Jazz,'" she recalled. "I thought that was so cute. As long as they...
...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 was a lifeline. She lived out all the suffering of her songs. For Ella Fitzgerald, music seemed more like a safe harbor, a home from which she rarely ventured...
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...
...incompatible with the bell-like clarity of her voice, one recognized by octogenarians and Generation Xers alike. She was performing as late as 1992, but the physical debilitation was crushing, aggravated mostly by diabetes that eventually led to the amputation of her legs below the knees in 1993. But Fitzgerald made no mythology of her personal life. Shy onstage, ill at ease in interviews, she let her songs do all the talking. She gave them a life of their own that superseded hers...
...Still, Fitzgerald had a lurking melancholy in her best 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...