Ella Fitzgerald, in Retrospect
by Judith Broadhurst

Even jazz fans who don't like singers or the nonsense syllables of scat singing speak of Ella Fitzgerald with reverence. She's a cultural icon. So being offered even a brief interview with the person the whole world calls simply "Ella" is rather like being granted an audience with the queen.

Up close, she looks very old and very vulnerable, much more so than the from the audience. Her speech is slow, measured, dry. It's the voice of wisdom yet, at the same time, that of a child, which is consistent with the ingenuous manner that is part of her charm. She sounds more Southern than like a native New Yorker, with a back-porch rhythm in her speech reminiscent of another time.

She remembers her first big break at the Apollo Theater's amateur night in Harlem vividly. Her friends dared her to do it, she says. "I wanted to be a dancer. People in Yonkers thought I was a good dancer, but I wasn't that good." She considers it fate that she was even chosen to perform, and what happened as a result. "They had two sisters called the Edwards Sisters and they were just sensational. When I went on, I was the first amateur and there was no way that I was goin' out there to dance after they closed the show. I thought I was gonna dance, but I saw all those lights out there and saw all those people, and somebody hollered, 'What is she gonna do?' and that did it. So what I did was I tried to sing numbers that Miss Connee Boswell did — my mother had her records. I won first prize." It was ten dollars.

When she was orphaned soon after that, Chick Webb took her into his band and under his wing, even becoming her legal guardian so she could perform at age 16. After he died, it was musicians like Dizzy Gillespie who became her mentors.

"I never had lessons. I learned all that I did through working with such great musicians who have been like brothers to me all through everything I've done — men like Duke Ellington and the late Count Basie. They used to give me such nice things to remember."

Then impresario Norman Granz recruited her for his Jazz at the Philharmonic tours. "He saw something that I guess nobody else saw," Ella says. He has been her mentor, manager and closest friend since, nearly 40 years. In his obsession to make jazz popular, Granz often insisted that artists do what audiences wanted to hear: honking saxophones, shrieking trumpets, bashing drum solos and jazzed up versions of bland, popular songs. He transformed Ella, as much as one could, into a singer with more popular appeal, mostly by controlling her material.

"I thought he was crazy when he had me do the first Cole Porter (album), but he felt that was something to get away from too much bop," she recalls. It was so successful he had her do a series of composer songbooks. "It was a beautiful thing happening for me because, from that, I gained more fans."

Already the best jazz singer since Billie Holiday when Granz showed up, he made Ella into a household name. She topped Down Beat jazz magazine's female vocalist polls for four decades, sold 25 million records and won every conceivable award, including many Grammys. In '86 Ella, who's diabetic, had a heart attack which required a quintuple bypass. That kept her off the touring circuit the better part of a year, the longest hiatus of her career.

Last year, when she was inducted into the Hall of Fame at the Grammy Awards, two men had to escort her onto the stage. She looked incredibly tiny and frail. But when she stood alone and sang one song, 20 years dropped away in an instant. She made goosebumps rise and tears well. Now Ella's doing a few concerts a month, still in places like Carnegie Hall and the Hollywood Bowl.

That perfect intonation and some of her range are gone. She veers off key now and then, and there's an occasional quivver which makes her voice sound a bit like Katherine Hepburn's. Her style is a little harsher, a bit less subtle than before. Understandably, a lot of her lifelong, excess weight and some of her stamina are gone too. She was out of breath after her opening number at last weekend's concert, but rebounded quickly and sustained high energy throughout the show.

But the difference between that fragile image on that TV screen during the Grammy show and what she looks like now on stage, is amazing. She's regained much of her verve. Despite the bright, sunburn kind of day, she was in hot, jewel-crusted evening gowns and kept saying, "tonite," probably more out of habit than any mental lapse. She sang her old songs, standards which were mostly by request.

"I sing for my audience, what they want," she says. Ella's certainly aware that she's a living legend, but discounts it. "I personally don't think there's no such thing as the greatest," she volunteers. "If there was, we wouldn't have but one person singin'. Not only that, you'd get tired of the song or somethin'. I like to hear different interpretations of different tunes.

"I listen to everybody. I love music, and I find that we all learn from each other...I even like some of the young kids now. I like Stevie Wonder. He writes such pretty tunes and I feel that I would like someday to make an album of some of the real pretty tunes that he's written. I love the lyrics, and I feel he is like the future here. He's like our Cole Porters and our Gershwins; he's today."

To everyone's surprise, Ella brought an old friend onstage, guitarist Joe Pass. He did a solo set then duets with her, including the best rendition of the day, "One Note Samba," which she scatted entirely. The trio rejoined her, with Pass still sitting in, to close with a lively version of Wonder's "You Are the Sunshine of My life." Ella has never lost her spirit, her feeling and expressiveness or her regal dignity. By waving and talking to stangers in the audience and honoring their incessant requests, she created an atmosphere of a reunion with old friends or a private party for jazz buffs. The heart inside her chest may be weaker, but the heart that Ella Fitzgerald is known for is as strong as ever.

Author's note: This was one of the last published interviews with Ella. She died in 1996.

Copyright 1989, Judith Broadhurst. All rights reserved.
Published by the Santa Cruz Setinel, 1989

For what she's been writing since, see the Recent Articles, Portfolio and Newsletter Archive sections.