The Genius of Ella Fitzgerald

By the time Granz took over Fitzgerald’s management in the mid-1950s, they had already worked together for years on Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic series, a touring all-star band whose ranks on any given night might include the likes of Roy Eldridge, Oscar Peterson, and Coleman Hawkins. As the JATP tours wound down, Granz orchestrated the most celebrated recording dates of Fitzgerald’s career, the late-’50s songbook sessions where Fitzgerald breathed immortality into the by-then-ancient texts of Tin Pan Alley: the corpora of Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, and Rodgers and Hart. In a primarily orchestral setting, Fitzgerald flexed the idiomatic intuition she’d developed over two decades of live performance, retooling familiar melodic phrases with panache.

Granz’s most important nonmusical contribution was getting Fitzgerald better pay, and a major element of his strategy was packaging her performances as luxury products. This altered the approach to the music itself: On the American Songbook records, he insisted that Fitzgerald sing the decorative lyrical introductions that had traditionally been omitted from earlier recordings. On an unusually drawn-out recording of “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” Fitzgerald incanted seven minutes of bawdy prayer.

Granz changed the physical medium, too. For several of the songbook albums, he replaced pictures of Fitzgerald with images by Matisse, Picasso, and Jean Dubuffet, as if to announce: “This is high art!” The three sets of liner notes for Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook, a 32-track double album, similarly communicated the “cultural authority,” in Tick’s words, of a “perfectly calibrated package for upper-middle- and middle-class-affluent consumers listening to high-fidelity LPs on their fashionable home consoles.”

The venues presented a more significant hurdle. For years, Fitzgerald had been a jazz-club musician, but Granz was determined to get her booked at the uptown lounges and hotels frequented by the white elite—no more “Fifty-Second Street money,” as he called the low-paying gigs in midtown Manhattan. The way in was to sell Fitzgerald on the terms of respectability, which by shifting the context of the music’s production threatened to mute its radical sensibility, if not also its ambition. The new audience meant a shifting critical public, as well as a different set of social terms within which the music’s meaning and value would be negotiated.

The typical venues for Black jazz musicians, of course, posed their own set of risks: During a JATP stop in Houston not long after Granz began managing her, police fearful of a bustling desegregated show arrested Fitzgerald and several of her bandmates on trumped-up charges of gambling. (She’d been throwing dice in the green room with Dizzy Gillespie.) The white press made a spectacle of the forlorn singer perched on a bench in the police station’s harsh glow, still in her concert-hall dress.

Racism at the hands of the record labels, the night clubs, the cops, and the press was nothing new. But as her career turned in Granz’s hands toward the peddling of prestige, the assaults on Fitzgerald’s intelligence swelled. To an emergent class of middle-brow white critics, her great fault was not that she lacked musical prowess so much as the sophistication to properly render a Cole Porter lyric.

Fitzgerald was often pitted against Billie Holiday in these terms (and still sometimes is), an opposition that Tick acknowledges is reductive. Holiday’s soul-baring—the fact that you can immediately hear her sadness and melancholy—presented itself to critics as evidence: Billie felt more than Ella did; therefore, she thought more. Holiday “was a story-teller who made most of her fans fall in love with her; [Fitzgerald] is a musician,” one early 1960s reviewer wrote. “She thinks notes rather than words.”

This was a common play—to suggest that “words,” for Fitzgerald, were “nonsense sound pegs to hang notes on,” as the scholar Robert O’Meally wrote in his 2000 biography of Holiday. She distinguished herself from Fitzgerald, O’Meally contended, by the fact that only Holiday became a “great interpreter.”

It is not an insult to point out that Fitzgerald treated her performances as a chance to unfasten words from their preferred meanings. But taken out of context, it risks reinforcing the assumption that other critics made: that Fitzgerald didn’t understand the lyrics, or that there was no animating force at all in her singing. Comparing her to Holiday in a 1962 study, the critic Benny Green cast Fitzgerald as a soulless technician. Her songbook albums were “faithful deadpan transcriptions,” but “all the correctitude in the world will not save the performance from artistic damnation.” Compared with Holiday’s impassioned tremulations, Fitzgerald’s performances amounted to “gibberish whose emotive content is roughly nil.”

Even more striking was the claim of the celebrated critic Francis Davis, in a book published 30 years later: “Unlike Judy Garland or Billie Holiday, Fitzgerald is a presentation singer who imposes no subjective weight on her material.”

Fitzgerald needs no rescue from her belittlers, because the performances outshone the criticism. And jazz was under assault from the moment it became an object of mass distribution. Coeval with this development, Gerald Early wrote in 1993, was jazz’s analytic “self-obsession”—its endless need to “legitimate its established mythical historicism while reinventing its history.” Paradoxically, Early claimed, jazz desires the “critical rhetorical analogue that it detests.”

The preoccupations of Fitzgerald’s critics, in a related way, make clear the assumptions she resisted in her performances. On the one hand, her disparagers betrayed a need for the didactic exposition of a song’s meaning, the kind that would satisfy their constrained criteria for sophistication. But singing, for Fitzgerald, was instead a way to destabilize ready-to-hand meanings, sometimes by simply letting a tune (as she was known to do on “How High the Moon” and “Mack the Knife”) spin into a cyclone of free association. For many minutes on end, she could interpolate bits of Chopin and Elvis and Louis Armstrong into collages of sound.

In lamenting her supposedly missing intellect, Fitzgerald’s critics also overlooked the thinking embodied in these performances, the piecing-together-out-loud she exemplified not only in scat but also in her ability to take a simple melodic idea and unfurl it into a complex harmonic sentence. As Fitzgerald moved away from the Great American Songbook and embraced a new wave of pop music, Amiri Baraka lamented the lack of recognition for Armstrong, Bessie Smith, and Charlie Parker’s contributions to the “history of ideas.” He questioned the insistence of jazz’s white critics in discussing the music shorn of any “socio-cultural” context. These critics’ standards of excellence, Baraka argued, missed the point that the music, in its “most profound manifestations,” was built to thwart precisely those standards.

Reading Tick’s book, one sometimes wishes that she would have dwelled further on this terrain before launching back into the chronology. The criticism of Fitzgerald’s intelligence, facile as it may seem, brings into relief the cultural apparatus that she pushed up against at a turning point in her career, and Tick does not always spell out how the social and material pressures that constrained her—Fitzgerald couldn’t buy a house in certain parts of Los Angeles, for example—were related to the social and material pressures shaping the critical landscape. But Tick does take care to show the way that Fitzgerald’s innovations were responses to her world. Jazz was dance music, and Fitzgerald was a singer who never stopped being a dancer. And scat, which demonstrated as well as any volume of modernist poetry the slippage between sound and word, was a way of interrupting a conversation among men.

The particular challenge of writing a biography of Fitzgerald lies in complicating what Tick acknowledges as the popular image of the singer: shy, inclined to privacy about most things except performing, and with a need to recede into the background offstage. (“No subjective weight,” as Francis Davis wrote.) The more salient challenge lies in overcoming the temptation to simply lay out the archive—an inclination prevalent in jazz biography, given the volume of artists for whom there is such a dearth of knowledge—in favor of a biographical interpretation that in arranging and examining the archive also reveals, radiantly, some new vision of the world that produced it. Ella Fitzgerald’s recordings are the reassuring traces of her own such transformations. As a close friend said of her: “She kept a lot inside her head.” In her music, Fitzgerald let out a lot more.