Remembering Ella
New York City around 1952 or so at Carnegie Hall, Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic and half the audience shouting "go, go, go" in unison. The stage filled with Flip Phillips and Perdido, Dizzy, Bird, Roy, Oscar and the famous drum battles between Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa and, there was Ella.
How high the moon, the bop national anthem taken further by her "scat singing" sic. She was much more than a scat singer. She was the ultimate musician and her horn was her voice. She was the one to lead the way for the others. She was the "State of the art" for her music.
I remember Stuttgart Germany and Liederhalle, the grand ultramodern,architecturally sober German concert hall, a concert hall devoid of any artifacts. I was in the Army then and Ella was coming through. After a couple of choruses of Perdido she had them. The often stiff German audience found something inside themselves that let them go. To date, I've never seen an ovation for a performer like the Germans gave Ella that night. She reciprocated with encore after encore sending them all home with a new view on life.
Some years later, I remember my Uncle Carl, a violinist on staff with the Dinah Shore show in Los Angeles back in the early Sixties, inviting me back stage to meet Ella; he knew my feelings about jazz. My heart, beating in 4/4 time actually seeing the great lady of song and shaking her hand and going away feeling she was a shy and unpretentious sweet lady.
I remember recently seeing her on television, the voice still with that melodious timbre, unmistakenly Ella, but the body ravaged by diabetes with its lack of concern for the who this was. The great lady was practically blind and that large and powerful frame reduced to skin and bones.
The rest of us can now turn to our records and CDs to recall, analyze, and listen to her wonderful music : the ballads, the bop and the pop tunes with our ears fully tuned to that unforgettable sound that made the walls of Carnegie hall sweat with delight from chorus after chorus of "Sweet Georgia Brown." It's been said often enough and it will always ring true that Ella Fitzgerald was indeed our "First Lady of Song."