How “America’s First Drug Czar” Waged War Against Billie Holiday and Other Jazz Legends Women of Jazz: Stream a Playlist of 91 Recordings by Great Female Jazz Musicians How Marilyn Monroe Helped Break Ella Fitzgerald Into the Big Time (1955) Just above, you can hear that live vocal track stripped of instrumentation except Ella’s voice in a Wings of Pegasus analysis video of the “depth of her expression” and vocal perfection.Įlla Fitzgerald’s Lost Interview about Racism & Segregation: Recorded in 1963, It’s Never Been Heard Until Now
ELLA FITZGERALD SONGBOOK FULL
The song, from Porgy and Bess (see the full performance further up), is just one of many written by the Gershwins that “transcends its musical theatre origins” due to Fitzgerald’s improvisatory brilliance and musical sensitivity. In the video at the top from a performance in Berlin in 1968, you can see Fitzgerald “destroy” the harmonic minor scale, as the YouTube uploader puts it, while pianist Tee Carson looks on in awe.
(We need look no further than the vicious persecution of Billie Holiday by the country’s first drug czar, Henry Anslinger, as case in point.) America may not always have been eager to embrace Fitzgerald, but she was happy nonetheless to gift the country its greatest music. establishment when Fitzgerald began her career.
ELLA FITZGERALD SONGBOOK PLUS
Those songs, plus alternate takes, were combined on a four-disc box set, Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Song Book, in 1998.
ELLA FITZGERALD SONGBOOK SERIES
What’s fascinating about that transformation is the way in which Fitzgerald’s renditions of popular songs elevated them to eternal mainstream status by drawing on the rhythmic and melodic resources of jazz, a distinctly Black American music sometimes cast as a threat to the U.S. by Leo Stanley During the late '50s, Ella Fitzgerald continued her Song Book records with Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Song Book, releasing a series of albums featuring 59 songs written by George and Ira Gershwin.
But she’s better known by another name, “The First Lady of Song,” for definitive interpretations of Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, and, of course, George and Ira Gershwin. Fitzgerald’s recordings of their songs played “an essential role in the broader transformation of the Gershwin’s music from show tunes to American Songbook standards,” writes the University of Michigan’s Gershwin Initiative. We could point to cuts from nearly any one of her over 200 albums as evidence for why she is the undisputed “Queen of Jazz,” a title for which she worked hard in her nearly 60-year career. No one ever gave Ella Fitzgerald faint praise.
Bush.“I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them.” - Ira Gershwin Over the course of her 59-year recording career, she was the winner of 13 Grammy Awards and was awarded the National Medal of Arts by Ronald Reagan and the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George H. With a vocal range spanning three octaves (D♭3 to D♭6), she was noted for her purity of tone, impeccable diction, phrasing and intonation, and a "horn-like" improvisational ability, particularly in her scat singing.įitzgerald was a notable interpreter of the Great American Songbook. Fitzgerald was a notable interpreter of the Grea Ella Jane Fitzgerald, also known as the "First Lady of Song", "Queen of Jazz", and "Lady Ella", was an American jazz and song vocalist. With a vocal range spanning three octaves (D♭3 to D♭6), she was noted for her purity of tone, impeccable diction, phrasing and intonation, and a "horn-like" improvisational ability, particularly in her scat singing. Ella Jane Fitzgerald, also known as the "First Lady of Song", "Queen of Jazz", and "Lady Ella", was an American jazz and song vocalist.
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