Ella Fitzgerald: A Biography
By Stuart Nicholson
Scribners, 322 pages, $23
The challenge of writing a full-scale biography of Ella Fitzgerald, the long acknowledged First Lady of Jazz, is captured by her longtime accompanist Paul Smith toward the end of British writer Stuart Nicholson’s book. Asked to compare Fitzgerald to Billie Holiday, Smith offers that “Billie had all her problems. . . . But there’s no scandal about Ella. She led a straight life . . . and that doesn’t make for exciting journalism.”
Smith oversimplifies a bit, as Nicholson makes clear with anecdotes about Fitzgerald’s difficult teenage years and her many unhappy romantic liaisons; but the gap between the singer’s extraordinary vocal gifts and nondescript lifestyle is quite real. Add Fitzgerald’s reclusiveness, which led her not only to refuse interviews to the author but also to frustrate his efforts to reach at least one old friend, and Nicholson’s task became truly challenging. If he gets bogged down at times in such available minutiae as old tour itineraries, performance reviews and gate receipts, he still manages to maintain an appreciative and surprisingly objective tone and to unearth a few new facts in the bargain.
At the outset, Nicholson reveals that Fitzgerald was born out of wedlock, in 1917 rather than 1918. Much of her youth was spent in Yonkers, N.Y., where she began singing and dancing with friends. While Fitzgerald always described these early years in rosy terms, Nicholson points out that her mother’s death in 1932 left young Ella homeless and forced her to run numbers. He confirms, through several sources, that she initially had difficulty cashing in on her 1934 amateur contest victory at the Apollo Theatre (which she originally planned to enter as a dancer) because of her shabby wardrobe and unkempt appearance.
She did catch on with Chick Webb, the preeminent drummer of the early Swing Era, because Webb recognized in her a package of unschooled talents that included an uncommonly pure voice and clear diction, a great ear and a sense of swing as great as his own. While Webb never legally adopted Fitzgerald or took her into his home, as legend has it, he did provide stability and exposure for the youngster, who quickly became the dominant personality in his orchestra.
Nicholson touches on the insecurities in Fitzgerald’s personality that alienated her from many of Webb’s musicians and created additional tensions after she assumed leadership of the band following the drummer’s death in 1939. He also records a chain of lovers, including famous musicians Jo Jones and Louis Jordan and possibly one of FDR’s sons, and the abortion that left her unable to bear children.
His keenest insights on this period, though, concern the way Fitzgerald built her popularity on novelty material and an unquestioning willingness to please. “No song was too trite or banal,” especially after her success with “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” and for a time it appeared that she would be imprisoned by a combination of poor taste and an innocent sound suggesting emotional shallowness.
Yet Fitzgerald’s supreme rhythmic gift came to the fore during World War II, after the Webb band had dissolved and she became exposed to the new ideas of modernists like Dizzy Gillespie. Her focus on scat singing in numbers like “Flying Home,” “Lady Be Good” and “How High the Moon” emphasized her playfulness and infectious swing and diverted attention from her rather uninvolving approach to ballads. She was a commercial success again and even enjoyed a relatively happy home life for a time after marrying bassist Ray Brown and adopting a son.
The real turning point in Fitzgerald’s career came in 1949, when she began working with Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts. Granz, who would become her personal manager and record producer, saw to it that Fitzgerald obtained the most prestigious nightclub and concert gigs and began the ambitious Songbook series that did so much for the status of both the singer and the American popular song.
Nicholson describes the commercial pressures that kept Milt Gabler, Fitzgerald’s producer at Decca Records, from liberating her from a diet of novelty trivia and justifiably points out the merits of neglected Decca performances like those on the recently reissued “Pure Ella” CD. He also makes some surprisingly honest judgments on the Songbooks, using the contemporaneous pairing of Frank Sinatra and Nelson Riddle to point up the shortcomings in some of Fitzgerald’s musical settings and the emotional shallowness in her interpretations that consigned much of the Songbook efforts to be “never more than good songs well sung.”
Nicholson’s aesthetic judgments are not infallible (the rough edges he criticizes in the Duke Ellington Songbook actually help to emphasize Fitzgerald’s musicianly qualities); yet he proves uncommonly objective for a biographer when he points out that Fitzgerald was never comfortable with the blues and lacked the force of personality that allowed a Billie Holiday or a Sinatra to transform the material they performed.
“She is fundamentally a humble singer,” he declares, and astutely observes that a more limited vocal technician like Chris Connor could make a song like “Ten Cents a Dance” come alive where Fitzgerald could not. Yet Nicholson also appreciates how never imposing her emotions on a song could be effective when the material was strong enough to carry itself; and his enthusiasm for those instances in which Fitzgerald summoned her emotional strengths (usually without orchestral backing, as on the albums “The Intimate Ella” and “Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie”) is well placed. Jazz historian Phil Schaap has contributed a 62-page discography that will help fans work their way through the half-century of music recorded by this imperfect yet still essential artist.
