Up from the Street

...She never has had the power of a Bessie Smith or even a Dinah Washington...

...She became a regular...

...More important were the interviews he did—with accompanists, producers, fellow performers in the Chick Webb Orchestra and the Jazz at the Philharmonic troupe, and many who simply count themselves as her friends...

...It was not an easy climb...

...He recorded her in every context—standard ballads with lush strings, intimate trio and quartet settings, and with the hearty horns of the JATP No singer was ever better served by a producer or a record label...

...In the end, I'm afraid that is about the extent of Stuart Nicholson's biography...

...Reviewed by Bruce Cook Author, "Listen to the Blues," "The Town that Country Built" ELLA FITZGERALD is called "America's first lady of song," and in her case it is more than a label dreamed up by some publicist...

...She dropped out of school, became a numbers runner, and even served for a time as a lookout for a "sporting house...

...It is a way of coping with life...

...She was born out of wedlock in 1917, a year earlier than was subsequently given out, in Newport News, Virginia...

...Thus we are left with an account so detailed it sometimes feels repetitive...

...By going my own way," he writes in his Preface, "I probably discovered more about her than I ever would have had I spoken to her...

...From them he learned what he believes she was trying to keep buried...

...Her warmth of tone, sureness of pitch and respect for melody and lyric are of a kind to warm the heart of any composer...

...Two months later, in January 1935, she won the rival Harlem Opera House competition and did get the week's work—without pay, it turned out, but with some new clothes...

...With her mother and stepfather, a Portuguese immigrant, she moved north to a mixed neighborhood in Yonkers, New York, at three...

...Perhaps she herself is preparing an "as told to" autobiography...

...Shortly afterward, her aunt took her away from her stepfather to live in Harlem...

...In 1932, when Ella was 15, her mother died...

...And in this book Stuart Nicholson gives space to the ongoing debate about the relative merits of Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, acknowledging Lady Day's ability to get "inside" a song, to wring from it every last drop of drama and emotion...

...Sarah Vaughan had a much greater range...

...But the prize, a week with the regular stage show, did not materialize because she was so unkempt and in need of a bath...

...Or perhaps, as Nicholson speculates, she has "replaced memories that are painful to her with an idealized version...

...Picked up by the authorities and sent to an orphanage, she soon ran away, sang and danced for pennies on Harlem's side-walks, and slept where she could...

...This was her situation when, at 17, she won the Amateur Night competition at the Apollo Theater...

...To me, there has always been something laconic and slightly distant about Ella Fitzgerald...

...In 1949, he persuaded Gale to let her do the Jazz at the Philharmonic tour...

...It took Norman Granz, in his dual role as impresario and recording executive, to work Ella's transformation from pop singer to jazz artist...

...Ella became a child of the streets...

...The information Fitzgerald appears to have wished to hide concerns, rather, the difficult circumstances of her childhood...

...Nicholson, a musician and critic who lives in England, has hardly produced an authorized biography...

...Ella was not, as legend has it, immediately enlisted by drummer Chick Webb as his vocalist...

...While it is true, as Nicholson demonstrates, that her 20 years on that label were not quite as disastrous as jazz purists seem to think, they certainly were not all they could have been either...

...It started in 1935, when she was a teenager, and has evolved continuously through the decades until today...

...It is not merely her endurance but the quality of her singing that is remarkable...

...What Ella has is something altogether different...

...Who knows why...

...Her one-time accompanist, Paul Smith, speaks of her as "a lady that never quite grew up...

...And she did...

...She was one of those kids who grew up listening to music on the radio and to phonograph records...

...In fact, it is clear from the long recital of the ins and outs of her career that she remained rather passive in the hands of her two managers—first Gale and subsequently Norman Granz—and her producer at Decca Records, Milt Gabler...

...Most of what I have written here probably seems little more than a rundown of the singer's career...

...Whatever the case, her refusal to cooperate, says the biographer, spurred him to dig deeply in his research...

...What other singer could boast a career that even begins to approach hers...

...Gabler produced all the recording sessions done under her own name at Decca...

...Although now well into her 70s and plagued by bad eyesight plus the myriad miseries of age, she still does occasional concerts and can be depended upon to bring audiences to their feet with her fast and furious version of "Lady Be Good...

...His dogged research has uncovered the specifics of her childhood and teenage years, yet her unwillingness to talk has deprived him of her voice, and he is reluctant to offer any personal analysis in his own...

...Even so, she sold22 million records for Decca...

...Most impressively, he tracked down people with whom Fitzgerald grew up?those who knew her before she made it as a singer...

...No, the nearest thing to a scandal in this book is the confirmation of a denied marriage to a man of questionable background at age 24—six years prior to her relatively happy marriage to bassist Ray Brown...

...On the contrary, Fitzgerald refused to grant him an interview, and also blocked his attempts to interview one of her longtime friends...

...Although he knew she could sing, he resisted mightily until he at last became convinced that under the street dirt and ragged clothes was a girl who could put his band on the charts...

...In addition to sifting through back issues of Down Beat and Metronome, he evidently read virtually everything ever published about his subject anywhere...

...Scandals...

...She had shown her potential with the Decca recordings of "Flying Home" and "Lady Be Good...

...Eventually Granz took over as her personal manager, and he served her equally well in that capacity...

...the author suggests the possibility that she was rescued from child abuse...

...She was recorded too often with groups such as the Ink Spots and the Delta Rhythm Boys, and given a diet of predominantly hitparade material...

...One should note that Ella did not aggressively grab that opportunity...

...Many who are quoted in this book mention her naivete and innocence...

...Now she has even managed to keep her biographer from coming too close...

...A-Tisket A-Tasket" and "Mr...

...In 1956, Granz won her away from Decca for his Verve label...

...Paganini" were only two of the memorable songs she recorded with Webb...

...She had it thrust upon her by Moe Gale, who managed Webb's fortunes and then hers...

...Her earliest favorites were Bing Crosby and the Boswell Sisters (particularly the lead singer, Connee Boswell), and she told all her friends with great certainty that she too would be in the spotlight one day...

...For her fans, this—complete with a full discography—may be enough...

...Granz surrounded her with the kind of free-swinging, hard-driving musicians who would bring out the best in her...

...This is why her greatest recorded successes were with the various "songbooks" —separate collections of the songs of George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and similar talents whose work comprises the foundation of the American standard pop repertoire...

...The public, black and white, responded so well to her that after Webb died of tuberculosis of the spine in 1939 she became the band's nominal leader and toured with it until, like most bands, it expired during World War II...