Ella Fitzgerald
Ella Fitzgerald was orphaned in early childhood and moved to New York to attend school in Yonkers orphanage. In 1934, she was discovered in an amateur contest sponsored by the Apollo Theater in New York City. This led to a commitment with the group of Chick Webb, and she quickly became a celebrity of the swing era with shows such as A-Tisket, A-Tasket (1938) and Undecided (1939). When Webb died in 1939, Fitzgerald assumed leadership of the band, who led for three years. She then embarked on a solo career, and issuing commercial recordings of jazz and in 1946 began a collaboration with Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic, which has finally a large international following.
She also sang in a jazz band led by her husband, Ray Brown (1948-52). In early 1956, Fitzgerald broke its longstanding relationship with Decca to join the newly founded Granz Verve label. Among the first projects was a series of 11 songs dedicated to the great American authors. The series has made use of the superiority of jazz-inflected arrangements of Nelson Riddle and others, and succeeded in attracting a wide audience of non-jazz, the establishment of the Fitzgerald supreme interpreters of popular song repertoire. Thereafter, his career was managed by Granz, and has become one of the best jazz performers of international renown. She has published numerous recordings for labels Granz and made frequent appearances at jazz festivals of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Oscar Peterson, Tommy Flanagan, and Joe Pass. Among her many awards is a Grammy Award in 1980. Her collection of scores and photos is now in the library of Boston University.
For decades, Fitzgerald was seen as the quintessential female jazz singer and drew lavish praise from admirers as diverse as Charlie Parker and the singer Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Her voice is small and somewhat girlish in timbre, but these disadvantages are offset by a very wide range (from D to C), which has orders with remarkable agility and a sense of swing smoothly. This allows her to give performances that rival the best jazz instrumentalists in their virtuosity, particularly in improvised scat solos, for which she is justly famous. Unlike the training of singers, it shows the strain on the breaking of his voice (d ‘and beyond), which, however, it uses the term effect in the construction of the highlights. Fitzgerald also has a gift of mimicry that enables him to imitate other well-known singers (Louis Armstrong to Aretha Franklin) and the instruments of jazz. As an interpreter of popular songs, it is limited by some innate gaiety of handling drama and pathos convincingly, but it is unmatched in its return of lightweight materials and its ease to slide in and out of the idiom jazz. It has influenced many popular American singers of the post-swing as well as international artists such as singer Miriam Makeba.