Ella Fitzgerald: “The First Lady Of Song”

Ella Fitzgerald is the greatest jazz singer who ever lived. Her artistry is the genius of jazz incarnate: creative, spontaneous, surprising, precise, and tasteful. She is a singer of such innate musical prowess that she can masterfully essay the most complex and rhythmically demanding phrases, seemingly without effort, as if she were having a normal conversation; she, in effect, handles words as though they were notes. And she stretches this extraordinary talent to the limit with her phenomenal skills in scat singing.

At her best, her musicianship is amazing and her pitch is astonishingly accurate- always.  In George and Ira Gershwin's Oh Lady Be Good, we hear a seemingly endless profusion of notes dancing all over the musical page, delighting the ear with their playful energy. We see here is a good example of that almost miraculous ability that some singers have of producing instantly with their voices exactly what they hear in their musical minds. This remarkable “ear-throat coordination” creates what I call “aural photographs.” Ella has this facility in spades.

For all her musical brilliance and prodigious vocal skill, remarkably enough, Ella rarely over-sings! Even when she performs with impressive speed and inventiveness, her musical choices, however intricate, always seem right and natural. This is jazz genius of the highest order.

Ella has been accused of singing without feeling at times, of not paying enough attention to colors in her voice, and finally, of not giving the lyrics of her songs adequate attention. Is there any truth to these accusations? These kinds of ideas miss the essence of Ella’s art. In a song like Harold Adamson and Jimmy McHugh's I Didn't Mean A Word I Said, we hear Ella giving an emotionally moving performance, in which her vocal colors reflect perfectly the emotional content of the lyrics. It’s clear that although Ella's extraordinary gifts were such that she could sing with exceptional emotional effect and tonal shading, although expressing her emotions in this way was not, in itself, a defining feature of her singing. Rather, she is in her most authentic element when her voice moves, trembles, and glows with adolescent energy. Her voice is intensely dynamic, and therein lies its beauty! It’s beauty in unpredictable motion. Ella’s art is not superficial, though it may appear so at times because joy has a way of seeming less profound than sorrow.

Although Ella has a beautifully pristine voice (and sings with excellent diction), it’s the precise movements and contours of her energetic, musical phrasing that is the defining aspect of her style; that is to say, she does not typically strive to paint rich musical pictures, with the colors of her voice modulating accordingly; but instead works to weave musical ideas into a sparkling tapestry of finely tuned notes and rapid, syncopated phrasing. While other singers may be caught up in the meaning of the lyrics, she uses lyrics not primarily as a way to tell a story, but as a way to play with the notes and tempos. You can really feel what I'm talking about when she sings Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlem's That Old Black Magic.

Ella sings for the sheer glory of music. She is not so concerned with exploring deep emotional states or giving voice the sad truths of the human heart. She prefers to compel you to move out of yourself; to forget yourself—to swing and dance and laugh. Her art, in short, energizes the natural pulses and primal actions of the body. There have been many great singers in jazz, but Ella stands on the very top rung of the artistic ladder. The reason is simple: no other jazz singer has taken the art form higher and has shown what jazz should and could be.

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