Icon: Ella Fitzgerald

Icon: Ella Fitzgerald
By Will Friedwald

“Man, woman, or child, Ella is the most!” Bing Crosby’s much-quoted praise of Ella Fitzgerald is suspiciously similar to Duke Ellington’s equally famous observation that Fitzgerald was “beyond category.” They were both right: Fitzgerald was much greater than any other jazz singer or any other female singer; over the course of a career that lasted 60 years, she consistently transcended genre, gender and just about everything else. How amazing is it that Fitzgerald was unquestionably the greatest scat singer in all of music, whose nonverbal, improvised flights of fancy consistently amuse and astound; yet, at the same time, she was also the vocalist most associated with the concept of songbook albums, in which she sang the melodies of famous show tunes as “straight” as the composers themselves wanted to hear them? She was a vocal virtuoso, and could do things with her voice that were positively superhuman — she was easily the Tatum and the Heifetz of jazz singers, yet her greatest asset was her warmth, her humanity and her earthiness.

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