Since April is Jazz Appreciation Month, and because so many of the finest practitioners of the genre were born this month, let’s pay a special birthday tribute to three of the all-time top jazz vocalists! Ella Fitzgerald (born April 25, 1917), Billie Holiday (born April 7, 1915), and Carmen McRae (born April 8, 1920) are all from the same generation, but each had a unique sound.
And since this year’s JAM is a celebration of the great Duke Ellington, we’re playing these ladies’ renditions of his work.
Check out our JAM kickoff and Duke retrospective here: Black Music Sunday: It’s Jazz Appreciation Month!
”Black Music Sunday” is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 200 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.
It is impossible to capture the entire history and impact Ella Fitzgerald had on Black music and vocal jazz in just one story! But Hannah Wong’s biographical summary at the Library of Congress, written in 1997, holds up as a good starting point.
‘First Lady of Song’ LC Collection Tells Ella Fitzgerald Story
Most every performer has a story about how he or she made it big, but few can match the tale of the late Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996). Recognized as the best female jazz vocalist of the century as well as a pioneer in the area of jazz, Fitzgerald was respected worldwide by musicians and audiences alike. Ironically, her earliest passion was not singing but dancing. Though she had participated in her school’s musical and glee club, Ella once wrote, “I never considered myself a singer. My real ambition was to dance.”
Like the rest of Harlem during the late 1920s, Fitzgerald was caught up in a dance craze that had people Lindy Hopping in ballrooms such as the Savoy. At home, Ella would imitate dancers such as Earl “Snakehips” Tucker, and during her lunch hours in junior high school, she and her friends would sneak into the theater to watch the shows.
But one day, the 15 year-old Ella entered the Apollo Theatre’s amateur night after drawing the short straw in a contest with two other friends to decide who among them would perform. Naturally, she was going to dance. “There I was, nervous as can be, only 15 years old with the skinniest legs you’ve ever seen — and I froze; got cold feet. The man in charge said that I had better do something up there, so I said I wanted to sing instead. The audience was laughing,” she wrote.
Ella decided to sing a song from an album of one of her favorite performers, Connee Boswell, called “The Object of My Affection.” Amazingly enough, the notoriously harsh audience at the Apollo stopped laughing, and soon began clapping for more. “Three encores later, the $25 prize was mine,” wrote Fitzgerald. And so, her illustrious career began.
The Onyx Queen Channel on YouTube features biographies of Black women, and offers a comprehensive 22-minute biography of Fitzgerald.
Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times critic Margo Jefferson shared some insights into Fitzgerald, her talent, and the realities of her career in 1996’s “Ella in Wonderland.”
Thank God for the radio and the phonograph: they gave a singer like Ella Fitzgerald the same advantage – invisibility – that letters gave Cyrano de Bergerac. And thank God for jazz. It gave black women what film and theater gave white women: a well-lighted space where they could play with roles and styles, conduct esthetic experiments and win money and praise. Ella Fitzgerald had a voice any romantic-comedy heroine would kill for: can you imagine her trying to fit her persona into one of those bossy, sassy or doggedy stoic movie maid’s roles patented for hefty women of color? Can you see her in ”Imitation of Life” or ”I’m No Angel”; in ”Alice Adams” or ”Gone With the Wind”?
[…]
Ella Fitzgerald fit no available or desirable cultural type. She wasn’t a lusty, tragic flues diva and she wasn’t a sultry, melancholy torch singer. People didn’t fantasize about her love life; they didn’t want to be her or have her. And so she turned herself into a force of music: music as it releases us from the dramas of our lives and lets us experience something more airy and other-worldly. She became Ella in Wonderland, where rhythm, harmony and melody ruled.
Ah, but a singer must make the lyrics matter, you say. Well, she found ways to make the lyrics sing, and that matters just as much. Anyway, this was a question of strategy as well as temperament. If you’re stuck with the 32-bar banalities she was so often handed, especially in the early years, you’re a fool to take them to heart or ask your listeners to. Ella eluded banalities with her buoyant phrasing and supple time sense; her melodic revisions and interpolations. Her scatting is a jazz form of nonsense poetry. And there’s her love of mimicry too: an infusion of Louis Armstrong here and of Connee Boswell there; some serious Dizzy Gillespie pyrotechnics and line readings fit for Shirley Temple or Marilyn Monroe.
But that’s enough talk. Let’s listen, starting with Fitzgerald performing live with Ellington on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in March 1965.
Here’s another live performance with the Duke—this time it’s “Lush Life,” the Billy Strayhorn masterpiece.
This clip is from 1968’s “Something Special, The Ella Fitzgerald Show.” Her guest was the Duke, and they performed “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.”
Fitzgerald and Ellington also recorded a lovely album in 1968, simply titled “Ella At Duke’s Place.” It should be in your collection.
Here’s “Something To Live For.”
Another must-listen is “Rockin’ in Rhythm,” from “Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Song Book.” It’s a great demonstration of her mastery of scat singing.
As a bonus, for readers who really love them some Ella, here’s three hours of listening, with the 66 tracks (listed here) of the complete “Ella Fitzgerald Sings Irving Berlin & Duke Ellington.”
The compilation opens with “Caravan,” composed by Juan Tizol and Ellington.
While Fitzgerald faced trials and tribulations in her early life, the entire life of our next star, Billie Holiday, was a series of ups and downs.
From Holiday’s official website:
Billie Holiday, born April 7, 1915 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was a superstar of her day. She first rose to prominence in the 1930’s with a unique style that reinvented the conventions of modern singing and performance. More than 80 years after making her first recording Billie’s legacy continues to embody what is elegant and cool in contemporary music. Holiday’s complicated life and her genre-defining autobiography “Lady Sings the Blues” made her a cultural icon. The evocative, soulful voice which she boldly put forth as a force for good, turned any song she sang into her own. Today, Billie Holiday is remembered for her musical masterpieces, her songwriting skills, creativity and courageous views on inequality and justice.
Holiday (born Eleanora Fagan Gough) grew up in jazz-soaked Baltimore of the 1920s. In her early teens, the beginning part of her “apprenticeship” was spent singing along with the records of iconoclasts Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong. In 1929 Billie’s mother Sadie Fagan moved to New York in search of better jobs. Young Eleanora soon joined her there and began showing up at jazz clubs to audition and sing with resident pianists. She made debuts in obscure Harlem nightclubs, sharing tips with other dancers and comedians on the bill. Around this time she borrowed her professional name Billie Holiday from screen actress Billie Dove. Although she never received technical training and never learned how to read music, Holiday quickly became an active participant in what was then the most vibrant jazz scene in the country – as the Harlem Renaissance transitioned into the Swing Era.
The 1986 PBS documentary “The Long Night of Lady Day” chronicles her triumphs and tragedies.
Raised primarily by her mother, Holiday had only a tenuous connection with her father, who was a jazz guitarist in Fletcher Henderson’s band. Living in extreme poverty, Holiday dropped out of school in the fifth grade and found a job running errands in a brothel. When she was twelve, Holiday moved with her mother to Harlem, where she was eventually arrested for prostitution.
Desperate for money, Holiday looked for work as a dancer at a Harlem speakeasy.
When there wasn’t an opening for a dancer, she auditioned as a singer. Long interested in both jazz and blues, Holiday wowed the owner and found herself singing at the popular Pod and Jerry’s Log Cabin. This led to a number of other jobs in Harlem jazz clubs, and by 1933 she had her first major breakthrough. She was only twenty when the well-connected jazz writer and producer John Hammond heard her fill in for a better-known performer. Soon after, he reported that she was the greatest singer he had ever heard. Her bluesy vocal style brought a slow and rough quality to the jazz standards that were often upbeat and light. This combination made for poignant and distinctive renditions of songs that were already standards. By slowing the tone with emotive vocals that reset the timing and rhythm, she added a new dimension to jazz singing.
With Hammond’s support, Holiday spent much of the 1930s working with a range of great jazz musicians, including Benny Goodman, Teddy Wilson, Duke Ellington, Ben Webster, and most importantly, the saxophonist Lester Young.
You can watch the entire film below!
Paul Alexander’s recently published biography of Holiday, “Bitter Crop: The Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holiday’s Last Year,” looks at her life and death through a different lens than most. In February, Alexander addressed those previous portrayals for Town and Country.
How I Learned the Truth About Billie Holiday
The author of a new biography on coming to understand the truth behind the legendary singer’s public persona.
Since Billie Holiday’s death in 1959, an image of her has emerged based mainly on the movies Lady Sings the Blues and The United States versus Billie Holiday. In these depictions of her, she is an in-the-gutter heroin addict who is so helpless she must be rescued from herself by the men in her life. In the end, she is a failure who died estranged from her last husband, strung out, and penniless.
Over the years, I assumed the portrayal of Holiday as a powerless victim was true. However, when I started researching Bitter Crop: The Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holiday’s Last Year, I was shocked to learn there was an entirely different version of Holiday to be discovered.
I haven’t read “Bitter Crop” yet—but I plan to.
RELATED STORY: As long as white supremacy endures, Billie Holiday’s ‘Strange Fruit’ will be an anthem of resistance
No matter the truth(s) about her life and death, Holiday’s music and voice has left an indelible mark on jazz.
Though she did not record much Ellington, Holiday made the songs she did cover entirely her own. Her version of Ellington’s “(In My) Solitude” is in the Grammy Hall of Fame.
Ellington composed and recorded “Prelude to a Kiss” in 1938. Recorded 17 years later, Holiday’s version is beautifully nuanced.
Ellington’s “Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me” featured Al Hibbler as vocalist when he released it in 1943. But Holiday’s bluesy 1956 rendition is my favorite version!
Keeping in tune with this week’s theme, let’s move on to “Sophisticated Lady.” KUVO’s “Stories of Standards” states:
“Sophisticated Lady” was introduced by Duke Ellington and His Orchestra in 1933 on a record that entered the pop charts in late May and stayed there for 16 weeks, having risen as far as number three. The flip side, “Stormy Weather”, did almost as well and went to number four. Ellington said he was inspired by three of his grade school teachers: “They taught all winter and toured Europe in the summer. To me that spelled sophistication”.
Holiday’s 1958 album “All of Nothing at All” is exceptional. Listening to her sing “Sophisticated Lady” makes me wonder if she approached it as if singing about herself.
Born April 8, 1920, Carmen McRae is not only one of my favorite jazz vocalists, she was also a Civil Rights Movement activist and the aunt of my Black Panther Party roommate.
RELATED STORY: Black Music Sunday: A Women’s History Month salute to three remarkable jazz vocalists
From her All About Jazz profile, by musician profile editor, record reviewer, and biographer James Nadal:
Considered by jazz aficionados to be among the top ten female vocalists of all time, Carmen McRae’s distinctive behind-the-beat phrasing, impeccable vocal control, and witty, sometimes acerbic way of conveying a lyric are what set her apart as a singularly great singer. She considered jazz great Billie Holiday to be a musical mentor. But this Queen of Cool had her own sound and style; including an amazing ability to scat. The versatile McRae could swing hard when it was called for; next she could draw out a ballad, savoring each note and syllable without losing audience attention; she was in a class by herself.
McRae was fortunate enough to have been raised by a family prosperous enough to afford a piano and lessons. Early on she expressed a strong interest in an acting career. By age twenty, her interest in music had taken over and she began singing as well as playing the piano. Even at a young age, she was a woman with something to say and throughout her life was recognized not only for her musical talents but for her immense love for verbal expression through musical lyrics.
Her first break was getting hired as an intermission pianist at Harlem’s world-famous Minton’s Playhouse, a jazz club. She became acquainted with many of the top modern jazz musicians of the time. An important influence was songwriter Irene Wilson, who introduced her to Billie Holiday. Wilson continued to encourage McRae to write music; one of McRae’s first attempts at songwriting, “Dream of Life,” was recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939.
I’ll never forget the benefit concert she did to help raise money to free the Panther 21 in New York City.
Her musical style and delivery was her own. As Ted Pankin wrote for Downbeat:
Carmen McRae’s chemistry with a lyric was not dissimilar to sodium pentothal’s effects on subjects of interrogation: The truth, for better or worse, would emerge.
[…]
“You have to improvise,” McRae said in the June 1991 issue of DownBeat. “You have to have something of your own that has to do with that song.” She could uncork vocal pyrotechnics when called for, but she deployed her technique to project an emotional directness and vulnerability more reminiscent of Billie Holiday—her first influence—than the on-the-sleeve virtuosity of Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald.
That McRae valued textual fidelity and restraint over florid expression is evident in a remark she made in the Jan. 2, 1964, DownBeat Blindfold Test. “If it gets to the point where you have to add an extra consonant or vowel at the end of a word … you don’t even know what is being said,” she opined. “Embellishing lyrics is fine, if it’s just an extra word here or there; but when you make a whole new sentence out of two words that the lyricist put there because that was what he wanted … well, I can’t see that, either.”
McRae was an expert connoisseur of the Ellington songbook—which can be heard in this live concert clip.
Ellington’s 1943 song “Come Sunday,” from his “Black, Brown and Beige” suite, is now a classic jazz standard; McCrae’s gentle, unembellished rendition does it justice.
Teaming up with Latin jazz percussionist Cal Tjader, McRae’s version of Ellington’s “Do Nothin’ Till You Hear From Me” has both salsa and soul.
I’m closing here, dear readers, but there will be more music in the comments. For further listening of these three jazz divas, check out “Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday And Carmen McRae – At Newport.” It’s a fantastic compilation!
Happy Jazz Appreciation Month!