Ella Meets the Duke

Today's World of Jazz is fat and sassy. So great is the embarrassment of riches served up in night spots, at concerts, on LPs, that the good performance is rejected as commonplace, the exceptional as merely acceptable. Rarely, then, does an event take place that can boost the pulse-beat of the jaded jazzophile. But such an event is the current release of Verve's "Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Song Book," a four-platter package that brings together -- for the first time -- two of jazzdom's greatest talents.

If one all-round genius of jazz could be singled out, that man would be Duke Ellington. For more than 30 years, no other figure has come close to matching the Duke -- as composer, conductor and arranger. No other figure has caused so much lasting excitement throughout the ups and downs of Dixie, swing, bop and cool. No other figure can boast his stunning string of infectious jazz hits. No other figure has influenced the entire jazz scene more than the Duke.

And if one all-round queen of jazz vocalists could be chosen, it would have to be Ella Fitzgerald. Her victory in the femme vocalist division of the first Playboy poll came as no surprise, for Ella has been copping top honors in polls continuously for the past 20 years.

That such jazz royalty should merge on LPs is as logical as serving caviar with champagne. Over two dozen of Ellington's finest songs are included. Ella sings some and scats on others, using her inimitable voice as a musical instrument. The Duke's full band accompanies Ella on a number of the pieces; on others, she warbles his elegies in the intimate setting of an all-star sextet, featuring Ben Webster and Stuff Smith. The LP package also includes an elegant Ellington instrumental salute, "Portrait of Ella," composed especially for the album.

During the series of recording sessions necessary to produce the four LPs, perfectionist Ellington was heard to complain that this had turned into one of the most demanding tasks of his life. "With Ella up front," Duke declared, "you've got to play better than your best."

One could find no more fitting time to tell the stories of these two jazz immortals and you will find intimate word pictures of both beginning on this spread.

The Duke Edward Kennedy Ellington Knows he is a great man. His denials, if and when they are made, are made in the full knowledge that a great man must include modesty among his self-evident characteristics.

What Duke Ellington knows, and has gladly accepted for three decades, is that his peer has yet to be found among jazz composers, arrangers and conductors. Cushioned by this knowledge, lulled by it into a permanent state of emotional ease, Ellington drifts through his daily life as though in a dream -- in a world where such unpleasant realities as box-office failures, moochers, swindlers, Jim Crow, junkies and the need to meet deadlines simply do not exist. When one of these problems touches him he will shrug it off, look the other way or simply convince himself that the incident happened to somebody else.

Barry Ulanov, in his book Duke Ellington, made it clear that the Duke's self-confidence is not of recent origin. "When he was late in getting up for school, his mother or his Aunt Florence would shake him and push him and rush him out of bed into his clothes. Once dressed, Duke's tempo would change. He would come downstairs slowly, with an elegance. At the foot of the stairs he would stop and call to his mother and his aunt.

" 'Stand over there,' he would direct, pointing to the wall. 'Now,' he would say, 'listen. This,' he would say slowly, with very careful articulation, 'is the great, the grand, the magnificent Duke Ellington.' Then he would bow. Looking up at his smiling mother and aunt, he would add, 'Now applaud, applaud.' And then he would run off to school."

The great, the grand, the magnificent Duke Ellington has been on display before a world-wide audience for some 30 years. Most experts place the starting point of fame at Dec. 4, 1927, the night the Ellington orchestra, augmented a few months earlier to the healthy complement of 10, opened at the Cotton Club, which was to Negro show business (continued on page 68)The Duke(continued from page 38) what the Palace was to vaudeville. (The Palace itself was to open its stage to the band less than two years later.) Ellington was then, and is now, an imposing figure. An inch over six feet tall, sturdily built, he had an innate grandeur that would have enabled him to step with unquenched dignity out of a mud puddle. His phrasing of an announcement, the elegance of his diction, the supreme courtesy of his bow, whether to a Duchess in London or a theatre audience in Des Moines, have lent stature not only to his own career but to the whole of jazz. Since the music he represented was stifled for many years by several kinds of segregation -- social, esthetic and racial -- this element certainly played a vital part in bringing to jazz its full recognition, just as his music itself brought the art he epitomized to a new peak of maturity.

Though he and his band have slipped from first place in some of the popularity polls, musicians and critics remain almost unanimous in their respect for Ellington and in their conviction that nothing and nobody -- no matter how loud the fanfare, how fickle the votes -- can replace or surpass his position as the greatest figure in the 50-year dynasty of jazz. None but Ellington can claim the reverent respect of an eclectic unofficial fan club composed of Woody Herman, Milton Berle, Arthur Fiedler, Peggy Lee, Percy Faith, Deems Taylor, Pee Wee Russell, Lena Horne, Lennie Tristano, Benny Goodman, Guy Lom-bardo, Dave Garroway, Cole Porter, Morton Gould, Lawrence Welk, André Kostelanetz and Gordon Jenkins, all of whom not only tossed verbal bouquets at Ellington on the occasion of the silver anniversary of his Cotton Club debut but also listed five of their favorite Ellington records. No other bandleader alive could persuade such a galaxy even to name five of his records, far less select the five best.

The Ellington orchestra, which aside from a few leaves of absence (including a Hollywood jaunt for its movie debut in a sleazy Amos and Andy feature, Check and Double Check) spent all of 1928, 1929 and 1930 at the Cotton Club, was to subside in later years into a pattern more familiar to dance orchestras, that of the floating band with occasional home bases. By 1957 Ellington and his sidemen had long been accustomed to the necessity of interminable one-night stands, with only an occasional one- or two-week stint at a major city and, very rarely, a few days of comparative leisure in New York to complete a disc date. Duke has been constantly under pressure from well-meaning friends and relatives who point out that his income might be boosted rather than diminished if he were to keep the band on salary, and on tour, for three or four months out of each year and spend the rest of his time at ease in New York, stretching his legs and mental muscles, writing music for shows and possibly acquiring the permanent television program that has long been one of his dreams. But Ellington without his musicians would be lost. "I want to have them around me to play my music," he has often said; "I'm not worried about creating music for posterity, I just want it to sound good right now!"

(continued on page 71)The Duke(continued from page 68)

Ellington's background upsets most of the convenient legends that envelop jazz giants. After having the poor taste to be born not in New Orleans but in Washington, D. C, he was raised not in poverty but in relative security, the son of a successful butler who worked at the White House and at many great parties held in the Capitol's embassies. Despite the rigid Jim Crow system that held in Washington, Ellington grew up a well-adjusted child.

Duke's nickname was awarded him, in obvious deference to his elegant style and manners, by a young neighbor, Ralph (Zeb) Green. Zeb and Duke's mother both liked to play piano, but apart from a few piano lessons when he was seven, Ellington had little interest in music until his middle teens. Before then, studying at Armstrong High in Washington, he became absorbed in art, revealed a nimble talent for sketching and even won a poster contest sponsored by the NAACP. The kicks he got out of making posters and working with colors paled as he developed a more intense concern for tone colors; by the time the Pratt Institute of Applied Arts in Brooklyn had offered him a scholarship, just before he left high school, his interests had switched to music and he turned the offer down.

During this period, the ragtime surrounding Duke Ellington provided ample evidence that jazz had long been flourishing far from New Orleans, often wrongly credited as its sole birthplace. Talking of the "two-fisted piano players" of that era, he recalls "men like Sticky Mack and Doc Perry and James P. Johnson and Willie 'The Lion' Smith ... With their left hand, they'd play big chords for the bass note, and just as big ones for the offbeat ... they did things technically you wouldn't believe." He had little time for the garrulous Jelly Roll Morton, whose reputation was built on Jelly's own ego rather than on musical values: "Jelly Roll played piano like one of those high school teachers in Washington; as a matter of fact, high school teachers played better jazz."

Ellington's informal music education, acquired from pianists he heard around Washington and later in New York, combined with his meager formal training, enabled him to make a substantial living out of music almost from the outset. Engaged in sign-painting by day and combo gigs by night, he was well enough fixed financially to get married in June, 1918, to Edna Thompson, whom he had known since their grade school days. The following year Mercer Ellington was born. By 1919, supplying bands for parties and dances, Duke was making upward of $150 a week. He attributes much of this early success to his decision to buy the largest advertisement in the orchestra section of Washington's classified telephone directory.

Ellington's first sojourn in New York in 1922 -- with Sonny Greer, Toby Hardwicke, Elmer Snowden and Arthur Whetsel -- was the only period in his life marked by real poverty. Jobs were so scarce, Duke remembers with a smile, that at one point they were forced to split a hot dog five ways. With the help of Ada Smith, who was later to achieve a degree of fame in Europe under the cognomen "Bricktop," the band opened at Barren's up in Harlem under Snow-den's nominal leadership. When they moved into a cellar club called the Hollywood at 49th and Broadway, Duke became the leader and Freddy Guy took over Snowden's banjo chair. This was their first downtown job, and it was during their incumbency at the Hollywood, later known as the Kentucky Club, that they made their first records.

The Kentucky Club era, which lasted four-and-a-half years, provided a warm storehouse of memories for the band: memories of wild breakfast parties after the job; of the patronage of Paul White-man and his musicians, working a block down Broadway at the Palais Royale; of $50 and $100 tips; Duke's first attempt to write the score for a show (The Chocolate Kiddies, in 1924, which never made Broadway, but ran for two years in Berlin); and the uninhibited bathtub gin busts of Duke, Bubber Miley and Toby Hardwicke in the very face of prohibition.

Ted Husing, one of the early and regular ringsiders, helped to secure the band its first broadcasts at the Kentucky Club. East St. Louis Toddle-O, a minor-to-major lament with an acute accent on plunger-muted brass, became the band's radio theme.

"I'll never forget the first time I heard Edward's music," says his sister Ruth. "Of course, we'd heard him at home, playing ragtime, but here he was playing his own music with his own band on the radio from New York, coming out of this old-fashioned horn-speaker. I think radio had just about been invented, or at least just launched commercially.

"It was quite a shock. Here we were, my mother and I, sitting in this very respectable, Victorian living room in Washington, my mother so puritanical she didn't even wear lipstick, and the announcer from New York tells us we are listening to 'Duke Ellington and his Jungle Music'! It sounded very strange and dissonant to us."

Black and Tan Fantasy, on which Bubber growled the famous interpolation from Chopin's Funeral March, may have horrified the Ellington family, but it succeeded in catching the attention of a man named Irving Mills. A successful song publisher who was beginning to extend his practice by dabbling in the management of artists, Mills soon formed a corporation in which he and Duke each owned 45% and a lawyer the other 10%. It was the start of a partnership that lasted through the Thirties, through the first great years of the Ellington story. Confident that his counsel and guidance were tantamount to full collaboration, Mills published the Ellington songs and also appeared on record labels and sheet music as co-composer of most of the famous Ellington hits of the Thirties, among them Mood Indigo, Sophisticated Lady, Solitude and I Let a Song Go out of My Heart. Mills wrote years later that he "withdrew" from his relationship with Duke because he sensed that Ellington had "fallen into a different attitude toward his music, and was taking off into what I thought to be a wrong direction." This claim was never disputed, nor was Ellington ever quoted on his side of the story. His characteristic avoidance of subjects that could not be discussed without personal recriminations precluded any public comment.

Matters about which Ellington feels more able to comment include a rundown of several high spots in his career, such as the band's first gig at the Palace Theatre when they opened the show with Dear Old Southland. "The men hadn't memorized their parts," recalls Duke, "and the show opened on a darkened stage. When I gave the down beat, nothing happened -- the men couldn't see a note."

A somewhat more recent highlight, but one that flickered out prematurely, was 1941's Jump for Joy, a stage review in which the whole band took part. "A number of critics felt this was the hip-pest Negro musical." says Duke, but this fact notwithstanding, the show ran for only three months in L.A. and never got the New York unveiling for which every Ellington well-wisher had hoped.

The evening of Saturday. January 23, 1943, was auspicious not only for Ellington, but for jazz itself. This was the first Ellington concert at Carnegie Hall and it was given under conditions that could not be duplicated today. A concert by a jazz orchestra was a rare novelty then (the last comparable event had been Benny Goodman's, five years earlier), and the orchestra played a new work, Black, Brown and Beige, described by the Duke as a "tone parallel to the history of the American Negro." In its original form, it ran for a full 50 minutes and was easily the most ambitious, spectacular and successful extension of Ellingtonia to longer musical forms.

As Ellington has pointed out, the quality of the appreciation, the attentiveness of the 3000 who listened that night, was "a model of audience reaction that has proved hard to duplicate." Ironically, when an Ellington jubilee concert was set for November, 1952, the presentation of a self-sufficient orchestra introducing original works was no longer considered desirable; it was announced that the show would also include Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Stan Getz and others. The concept of a jazz concert as Ellington had visualized it was dead.

To bring his listing up to date, Ellington would have to add the chaotic scene at Newport, Rhode Island, during the three-day jazz festival in July, 1956. During an extended and revitalized version of a fast blues entitled Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue, first recorded in 1938 and lengthened on this occasion to 14 minutes and 59 choruses, Ellington and his band whipped the audience into such a frenzy that elder jazz statesmen present could recall no comparable scene since the riots occasioned in the aisles of New York's Paramount Theatre two decades earlier during Benny Goodman's first wave of glory.

During the years of his undisputed acceptance as leader of the world's foremost jazz orchestra, and as the most distinguished of jazz composers, Ellington's career moved forward in three different areas. From the economic standpoint the most important was his work as a song writer. Some of his biggest hits were written casually in taxis, trains and recording studios (but never in planes; his aversion to flying is intense) and are simple single-note lines designed to be set to lyrics; others, whether written casually or more formally, were primarily instrumentals for the orchestra but were later furnished with lyrics. At this stage, Ellington is in the field with Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers.

From the esthetic standpoint, Ellington's significance as a contributor to the culture of the Twentieth Century lies in his orchestrations of original music for the instrument he plays best -- his own orchestra. These range from simple blues and stomps to such elaborate efforts as the Liberian Suite, New World A-Comin', Blue Belles of Harlem and Blutopia, all of which were heard during the annual Carnegie Hall series but few of which have been preserved on records. In this department, Ellington's counterparts are Jimmy Giuffre, John Lewis, Shorty Rogers, Ralph Burns and a large number of other men, none of whom has yet achieved anything approaching the stature of Ellington.

Thirdly, there is Ellington the dance band leader, who occasionally tries for a hit record and comes up with something like Twelfth Street Rag Mambo or Isle of Capri Mambo in an attempt to sail with a prevailing trade wind. This Ellington, more acutely conscious in recent years of the implacable exigencies of the commercial world, is wont to open a dance date or even a stage show with an arrangement of Stompin' at the Savoy, which was neither composed nor arranged by anyone in the band and has about as much of the Ellington stamp as a Sammy Kaye arrangement of Solitude. In this sphere, Ellington's competitors include Ray Anthony, Count Basie, and Woody Herman.

Not content to limit himself to mere composing, orchestrating and leading a band, Ellington has also set his sights on other fields. As a composer-dramatist he was responsible in 1956-7 for A Drum Is a Woman, a sort of jazz-tinged opera-cum-ballet in which he was the slightly specious narrator; earlier he had shown himself capable of achieving a simple beauty in the pyramid-lined construction of The Blues, the only lyricized passage in Black, Brown and Beige, and a sophisticated brand of hip humor in Monologue. As a librettist he has had a few misadventures: one hears of his plans to stage his own Broadway musical, or a straight drama, or a comedy with music, or some other venture that fails to materialize after months of rumors. "What the hell, you have to have some direction, you've got to go somewhere," he was heard to remark recently when his insistence on entering this field was questioned. Having scaled every mountain peak available to him, he has had to look for new heights to conquer. "I'm so damned fickle," he once said. "I never could stick with what I was doing -- always wanted to try something new."

Ellington's personality is riddled with paradoxes. "I may be a heel," he is reported to have said, "but I hate for people to think so." His warm personal attachments are few, but intense. When his mother died a lingering death in 1935, he was at her bedside for the last three days, inconsolably grief-stricken. Two years later his father died in a New York hospital with both his children beside him. His sister Ruth, 16 years his junior, became Duke's closest friend and confidante. Dr. Arthur Logan, the family physician for the past 20 years, caters to his hypochondriacal tendencies. Fundamentally strong and healthy, Ellington gave up his heavy drinking around 1940, but never stopped indulging his insatiable appetite until, in 1956, he embarked on a diet and reduced his contours by some 35 pounds.

Ellington's vanity takes strange turns. His son, Mercer, tall and good-looking like his father, has had several chaotic careers -- bandleader, trumpet player, band manager, liquor salesman, record company executive, and general aide-de-camp to his father -- and has suffered from Duke's vacillations between parental pride and the desire to hide from the calendar. Mercer played E-flat horn in the Ellington band for a few months in 1950, but was dropped without notice from Ellington Sr.

Ellington's customary demeanor, with strangers or casual friends, is one of sardonic badinage or subtle sarcasm that catches the victim unaware. "We are indeed honored by the presence of such luminous company," he will say with a low bow to a song publisher with whose company he would be delighted to dispense. His capacity for small talk is endless. Complimented by a feminine guest on a striking blue and gray checked jacket he wore during a recent Birdland engagement, he promptly rejoined: "Yes, I was up all afternoon sitting at the loom, weaving it to impress you." It is difficult to coax him into an intellectual discussion; his reluctance to bruise any feelings and his desire to remain noncontroversial are jointly responsible.

Ellington is a magnificent and magniloquent mixer, as befits one who, alone among jazz musicians, enjoys the respect of Leopold Stokowski (who came in alone to the Cotton Club, sat discussing the music with Duke and invited him to his own concert the following evening at Carnegie Hall); President Truman ("whom I found very affable and musically informed," during a half-hour private audience at the White House); the Prince of Wales (now the Duke of Windsor: "he sat in with us on drums in London and surprised everybody, including Sonny Greer"); George, Duke of Kent ("I fluffed off the guy who kept requesting tunes all night, then found out he was the King's son"); as well as Jackie Gleason and Orson Welles.

Some of his fans have wondered why Ellington, who used to set so many trends, has tended to follow others in recent years. His was the first band to use the human voice as a wordless musical instrument (Creole Love Call, in 1927); first to devote an entire work to a single jazz soloist (Clarinet Lament for Barney Bigard, in 1936); first to use extended forms beyond the standard three-minute length of the 78 rpm record (the six-minute Creole Rhapsody and 12-minute Reminiscing in Tempo in the Thirties); first to use the bass as a melody solo instrument (Jimmy Blanton, 1939); first to make elaborate use of rubber-plunger mutes and Latin rhythms in the U.S. Asked why he now reverts to the likes of In the Mood and One O'Clock Jump, which have none of the Ellington sound, and why he writes so few new long works, he remarks brusquely that nobody can dictate to him what is meant by "the Ellington sound," that the pieces thus criticized are warmly received by the audience, and that there is no call for the longer works. Perhaps this can be explained by one of his greatest frustrations -- that Black, Brown and Beige was coolly received by a number of critics and was never recorded in its entirety.

Ellington's oldest and closest friend within the band is Harry Carney, now in his 31st year as an Ellingtonian, and usually Duke's driving companion between one-night stands. Musically, his closest ties are with Billy Strayhorn, his sidekick for almost two decades. Ever since he joined the orchestra, Ellington has had an almost telepathic understanding with "Strays," whose writing for the band so closely resembles Ellington's own that veteran bandsmen are sometimes unable to discern where one leaves off and the other begins. Ellington, a lenient employer, gives him complete freedom to come and go as he pleases, a freedom Strayhorn exercised not long ago to the extent of wandering off briefly into a job as accompanist to his friend Lena Horne.

The Ellington employment policy has (concluded on page 77)The Duke(continued from page 73) always been unique. The idea of firing anyone is so repugnant to Duke that he will tolerate unparalleled degrees of insubordination. It is no less painful to him to find a sideman quitting without due cause, which in his eyes means nothing less than complete physical disability or retirement. Men stepping out to form their own groups have hurried off the bandstand to the echo of Ellington's laconic comment, "He'll be back," and in a matter of months or years this has almost always been true. Johnny Hodges, Ray Nance and Cat Anderson, all members of the 1957 orchestra, had at one time left to launch ventures of their own that petered out.

Observers of Ellington rehearsals, and even of public performances at which two or three men may amble in an hour late, find it hard to believe that the apparent lack of band morale can produce such exemplary music. They are no less bewildered by the team spirit in the brass, reed and rhythm sections, despite the fact that certain men may not be on speaking terms with Ellington or each other or both.

Duke's escapism and aloofness have had the valuable effect of keeping him clear of any musical hybridization, any involvement with other musical forms. He rarely listens to classical music, but when he does, his taste runs to such works as Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe, Debussy's La Mer and Afternoon of a Faun and Delius' In A Summer Garden.

In addition to its complete independence from classical and modern concert music, Ellington's orchestration technique cannot be said to have founded any particular school within jazz itself. Direct imitation has often been found in the recordings of Charlie Barnet, Woody Herman and others; the impact of Ellington on Ralph Burns and other contemporary arrangers is unmistakable. Yet there is no true parallel between Ellington and any lesser jazz scorer comparable to that which exists, say, between Milhaud and Pete Rugolo. The reason is simple: Ellington's works remain inscrutable. He has never allowed his orchestrations to be published, preferring to take the secrets of his voicings on solo journey to posterity.

The result is best summed up by André Previn, a musician who was not yet born when the Cotton Club era began. "You know," said Previn, "another band leader can stand in front of a thousand fiddles and a thousand brass, give the down beat, and every studio arranger can nod his head and say 'Oh, yes, that's done like this.' But Duke merely lifts his finger, three horns make a sound, and nobody knows what it is!"

Ella The Evening of July 20, 1957, was perfect for a concert under the stars. The audience of 16,500 at the Hollywood Bowl, still cheering, loosed a fresh burst of applause as the tallish, heavily-built girl returned to the mike. Frank DeVol gave the cue as 102 musicians, most of them members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, cruised into the introduction of a new, mambo-style arrangement of A-Tisket A-Tasket.

On the basis of 750 shows a year for close to 20 years, this was approximately the 15,000th time Ella Fitzgerald had sung her first and best known hit, but tonight a symbolic significance had attached itself to the performance: Ella was the only attraction at the Bowl. In the words of the TV quizmasters, she had reached a new plateau.

En route from the Lafayette Theatre, in Harlem, where she had been booed off the stage at an amateur night appearance 23 years earlier, she had traveled slowly and inexorably upward through three professional phases. First: as a member of the Chick Webb band warbling inane pops and novelty numbers. Then: as a solo attraction, moving up from the smokier and more obscure bistros to concert tours that brought her before enraptured crowds throughout Europe, Japan and Australia. And third: as a star of the smarter supper clubs, a solo concert recitalist, and a best-selling record artist purveying the intelligent music of Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, and Duke Ellington.

Ella's life will never be made into a movie. The worlds of alcoholism, dope addiction and kindred vices -- stepping stones to the best-seller lists and Hollywood's wide-screen -- are utterly alien to her. Even the fable that she was raised in an orphanage, which might offer a slender story line, is untrue. Nevertheless, the graph of her progress reveals that the Hollywood Bowl must have seemed at one time as far out of reach artistically as it was geographically.

Ella Fitzgerald was born Ella Fitzgerald in Newport News, Va., April 25, 1918. She never knew her real father or her native town; moving north as a child, she lived in Yonkers with her mother and stepfather. During her childhood years, she spent much time shuttling back and forth between her mother and an aunt, Mrs. Virginia Williams.

Despite her early undernourished appearance, Ella was a healthy kid who loved to dance and sing. During lunch hours at junior high, she would sneak off with a couple of friends to catch Dolly Dawn at a theatre with George Hall's orchestra, and at night she would flip over the Boswell Sisters on the radio; Connee Boswell soon became her favorite.

"Everybody in Yonkers thought I was a good dancer," Ella says. "I really wanted to be a dancer, not a singer. One day two girlfriends and I made a bet -- a dare. We all wanted to get on the stage, and we drew straws to see which of us would go on the amateur hour. I drew the short straw, and that's how I got started winning all these shows."

Ella's first appearance, at the Apollo, won her a prize. "Benny Carter saw the show and told John Hammond about me; they took me up to Fletcher Henderson's house, but I guess they weren't too impressed when I sang for Fletcher, because he said 'don't call me, I'll call you.' "

The round of amateur hours continued, and word leaked downtown to the CBS offices, where there was talk of putting Ella on a show with Arthur Tracy, The Street Singer. After the audition a contract was drawn up, and Ella was promised she would get a "build-up like Connee Boswell," an assurance tantamount to a guarantee that a fledgling heavyweight was to be groomed as the next Joe Louis. The bubble burst suddenly when Ella's mother died, leaving her orphaned, a minor, with nobody to accept legal responsibilities for her.

A week or two later, forced to resume the weary amateur hour routine in the hope of making a buck, Ella lost a contest for the first -- and last -- time. Dressed in black, she tried to sing Lost in a Fog. ("The pianist didn't know the chord changes and I really did get lost.") Ella ran off stage bawling to the accompaniment of boos. Her long-delayed professional debut took place soon afterward -- a week's work at the Harlem Opera House for $50.

"Tiny Bradshaw's band was on that show," Ella remembers. "They put me on right at the end, when everybody had on their coats and was getting ready to leave. Tiny said, 'Ladies and gentlemen, here is the young girl that's been winning all the contests,' and they all came back and took their coats off and sat down again."

The orchestra scheduled to follow Bradshaw's was that of Chick Webb, a drummer from Baltimore who, frail and humpbacked and barely literate, had risen magnificently above these handicaps to form one of the greatest bands of the day. Though primed by Benny Carter and by Bardu Ali, a wandwaver who fronted the Webb group, Chick resolutely refused to add to his vocal entourage, which consisted of a male ballad singer. "He didn't want no girl singer, so they hid me in his dressing room and forced him to listen to me," Ella recalls.

"I only knew three songs: Judy, The Object of My Affection and Believe It Beloved. I knew them all from Connee Boswell. I sang all three of them. Chick still wasn't convinced, but he said, 'OK, we'll take her on the one-nighter to Yale tomorrow.' Tiny Bradshaw and the chorus girls had all kicked in to buy me a gown. The kids at Yale seemed to like me, so Chick said he'd give me a week's try-out with the band at the Savoy Ballroom."

"The first time she came to my office," says Moe Gale, who was Webb's manager, "she looked incredible. Her hair disheveled, her clothes just terrible. I said to Chick, 'My God, what can you do with this girl?' Chick answered, 'Mr. Gale, you'd be surprised what a beauty parlor and some make-up and nice clothes can do.' "

They did a lot, but they couldn't produce a Cinderella overnight. Edgar Sampson, saxophonist and arranger with Webb, recalls: "We all kidded her. It would always be 'Hey, Sis, where'd you get those clothes?' We all called her Sis. And 'Sis, what's with that hairdo?' But she always took it in good spirits."

Ella was still slim during her first months with the band, despite her fondness for southern cooking. While the Lindy Hoppers at Harlem's famous Savoy grew familiar with Fitzgerald in person, her voice alone was slowly becoming known to radio listeners everywhere as the band broadcast late-night remotes. Eventually, Ella's fame forced Chick to include her in a record date for Decca.

"I'll never forget it; the record was Love and Kisses. After we made it the band was in Philadelphia one night when they wouldn't let me in at some beer garden where I wanted to hear it on the piccolo (jukebox). So I had some fellow who was over 21 go in and put a nickel in while I stood outside and listened to my own voice coming out.

"Things went so good that by the fall of '36 Benny Goodman had me make some records with the band for Victor. But Chick was under contract to Decca and they made them call the records back in." (There were three tunes, all rare collectors' items today.)

Ella's reputation had spread so far and fast that by 1937 she won her first Down Beat poll, sharing the vocal victory honors with Bing Crosby. It was pride rather than southern cooking that swelled her when Jimmie Lunceford, whose band she revered, offered her a job at $75 a week. Though he later retracted the bid out of respect for Webb, it did enable Ella to get another raise. Her salary crept up to $50 and before long was to reach $125.

This was the 52nd Street era. Jazz clubs spread like crazy, and the catch phrase "swing music" was on everybody's lips. Anybody who could "swing, brother, swing," was in great demand. Stuff Smith tried it on the fiddle, Artie Shaw had a whole string section in his band, and Maxine Sullivan, showing Onyx Club audiences how to swing a folk song, was the new national rage as the Loch Lomond lady.

If you could swing a folk song, mused Ella, why not extend the concept? One day the band was at a rehearsal in Boston when Van Alexander, who was doing some of the vocal arrangements, heard her fooling around with an old children's ditty.

"Hey, why don't we get together and add some lyrics and a middle part?" he suggested.

So they nursed it, rehearsed it, and gave out the news that the Webb band had given birth to -- A-Tisket A-Tasket. A couple of months later, the band, with Ella handling the vocal, cut the tune for Decca. It was a smash. "If they'd been giving out gold records in those days I imagine we'd have gotten one," says Ella.

The Webb band and Ella flew high with their hit records. They played the Park Central Hotel, as well as two dates at the Paramount Theatre. But Chick's health deteriorated rapidly: he had tuberculosis of the spine and it was a miracle that he could summon enough stamina even to sit behind his drums.

After the band played a riverboat outside Washington, he was rushed to Johns Hopkins for an operation. Chick's amazing will to live carried him through a whole week, then the pain-wracked little giant looked around at friends and relatives, had his mother lift him up, said, "I'm sorry -- I gotta go!" and passed away.

All who remember agree that Ella's voice will never surpass the poignant beauty it achieved when she sang at Chick's funeral. "There were thousands of people," says Moe Gale. "It was the biggest funeral I had ever seen -- and I know there wasn't a dry eye when Ella sang."

Life began again when Gale decided the band should keep going, using Chick's name but with Ella fronting and one of the saxophonists as musical director. There were more tours and (continued overleaf)EllaContinued from page 40) records and Ella won her third straight Down Beat victory.

When the band hit Los Angeles, some of its members were invited to earn an extra $6 by playing an occasional jam session run informally at a night club by a tall, intense young man named Norman Granz. "Sure, he used my musicians but he didn't want me; he just didn't dig me," smiles Ella today. ("I never used Nat Cole either," admits Granz.)

The bandleading era was not one of the happier Fitzgerald phases. Ella contracted a marriage that was a mistake from the start and was ultimately resolved by an annulment. Meanwhile the draft had wrought havoc with the band's personnel, and Ella's career as a bandleader was over: Gale teamed her with a vocal-instrumental group, the Four Keys, a union that produced one big hit record, All I Need Is You, until the Keys got drafted themselves. Ella joined forces with a series of road shows.

The jazz revolution engineered by bop never fazed her; she had Gillespie in her band for a while in 1941 and her keen ear grasped the harmonic intricacies of the new style well enough to enable her to incorporate it in a series of wordless performances known alternately as scat singing or bop singing. Flyin' Home in '46, Lady Be Good in '47 and a series of follow-ups established her with the same addicts who combed the record shops for the latest Diz and Bird platters.

An early member of the bop clique was a young bassist from Pittsburgh, Ray Brown, who, after a long apprenticeship in Gillespie's combo, began to play dates with Norman Granz, who by now had moved out of the night clubs into the comparatively open air of the concert hall. Ella's interest in this new kind of music began to focus on Mr. Brown. Visiting him at a "Jazz at the Philharmonic" concert, Ella was spotted in the audience and asked to do a number by her admiring fans. Granz grudgingly consented and Ella knocked everybody out -- including Granz. A contract was offered then and there. She married Ray Brown that same year, 1948.

Once aboard the Granzwagon, Ella's prestige gained momentum. For a decade she has been a regular member of his unit, though to Granz's regret he had to excise her vocal segments from records of his concerts because her Decca contract was still in force. Not until 1955, when he was able to negotiate a release, did Granz snare her for his own Verve label. Moving fast, he teamed her with Louis Armstrong on an LP, gave her a flock of Cole Porter songs for another, followed it up with Rodgers and Hart, and kept her constantly on the best-seller lists.

The mutual trust and admiration kindled between Ella and Granz eventually cast him, a couple of years ago, in the role of personal manager. Their business alliance has proved more durable than the marital tie with Brown, which ended in 1952 in divorce.

Granz aims to have Ella work only eight months a year and take it easy the rest of the time; but she thrives on travel, on the company of musicians and on the applause of audiences from continent to continent.

Never able to conceive of herself as someone famous and talented, Ella is constantly amazed at her reputation. There are no anecdotes concerning her encounters with celebrities because, not considering herself their peer, she shuns them. Newspapermen often wrongly attribute to haughtiness the reserved, seemingly uncooperative manner with which she reluctantly confronts them.

"You will never meet a star more completely un-publicity-conscious than Ella," observes her harassed press agent, Virginia Wicks. "She can come over to the house and we'll exchange small talk and she's just as sweet and charming as can be. Then I'll gingerly try to ease the conversation around to, say, a Life or Time man that wants to see her and her face will fall and she'll stomp her foot and say, 'Gosh darn it, Virginia, I can't do it -- I have to go shopping!' And she'll stay crotchety, but finally, very reluctantly, she may say, 'Oh, all right.' " When Ella is sulky, her manner and expression are identical with those of the little girl she becomes in the song when, in answer to the line "Was it green?" she pouts and answers, "No, no, no, no!"

Ella's other bête noire is the cameraman, especially the type whose flash bulb tactfully explodes during the more tender syllables of a love song. "That's the one thing that can drive her crazy at concerts," Granz says, "that and nervousness. I have yet to see her do a show when she isn't nervous. We can be at an afternoon concert playing to a small house in Mannheim, Germany, in the fifth week of a tour, doing the same show she's done every day, and she'll come backstage afterward and say, 'Gee, do you think I did all right? I was so scared out there.'

"She and I have no contract," Granz adds, "just a handshake, and we can afford the luxury of telling each other off. On the last tour in Italy we had a terrible flare-up. It was in Milan; she didn't sing April in Paris, her big hit record there; instead she let the audience shout her into Lady Be Good. When she came off I yelled and she yelled and we didn't speak for three days."

The views of Ella's managers and fans alike concerning what songs are best for her were in violent conflict for many years. Always a frustrated ballad singer, she burst into tears when Chick Webb ("He didn't think I was ready to sing ballads") assigned to the band's male vocalist a tune that had been specially arranged for Ella.

"She was temperamental about what she sang," says Tim Gale, Moe's brother, whose booking agency handled Ella for many years. "However, she would sing anything if her advisors were insistent. One of her records was a thing called Happiness. She cut it under protest; I brought the dub backstage to her at the Paramount, and she said 'It's a shame. A corny performance of a corny song.' It turned out to be one of her biggest sellers.

"She once played a club in Omaha when Frankie Laine's Mule Train was a tremendous hit. One of the biggest spenders in Omaha came in constantly and demanded that she sing it. She kept ducking it until finally the club boss begged her to please the money guy. Ella said to herself 'I'll sing it in such a way that he'll never ask for it again,' and proceeded to do a burlesque so tremendous that on leaving town she kept it in the act and scored riotously with it everywhere -- even at Bop City."

Granz's first move on assuming the managerial reins was to steer Ella away from the jazz joints and into the class clubs. Skeptical at first, Ella gradually took to the new, plush environments when she found that an audience at the Fairmont in San Francisco or the Copa in New York was as susceptible to Air Mail Special and Tenderly as the bunch at Birdland.

The quantity of Ella's performances has caused more disagreements than the quality. "I'll ask her to do two ballads in a row, to set a mood," says Granz, "but some kid in the back will yell How High the Moon and off she'll go. Or I'll say I want her to do eight tunes and she'll say 'Don't you think that's too many? Let's make it six.' And she'll go out there and do the six and then if the audience wants 50 she'll stay for 44 more. It's part of her whole approach to life. She just loves to sing."

"Every tour I ever made with her convinced me that singing is her whole life," says guitarist Barney Kessel. "I remember once in Genoa, Italy, we sat down to eat and the restaurant was empty except for Lester Young and his wife and Ella and me. So while we waited to give our breakfast order I pulled out my guitar and she and Lester started making up fabulous things on the blues.

Ella(continued from page 42) "Another time, when we were touring Switzerland, instead of gossiping with the rest of the troupe on the bus, she and I would get together and she'd take some tune like Blue Lou and sing it every way in the world. She'd do it like Mahalia Jackson and like Sarah and finally make up new lyrics for it. She would try to exhaust every possibility, as if she were trying to develop improvisation to a new point by ad libbing lyrically too, the way Calypso singers do."

"Ella does that even on shows," recalls another musician who toured with her for years. "If there's a heckler she'll interpolate a swinging warning to him in the middle of a number, or the mike'll go wrong and she'll tell the engineer about it in words and music.

"But she's terribly sensitive socially. Whenever she hears a crowd mumbling she feels that they are discussing her -- and always unfavorably. I think she lays so much stress on being accepted in music because this is the one area of life into which she feels she can fit successfully. Her marriages failed; she doesn't hav'e an awful lot of the normal activities most women have, such as home life, so she wraps herself up entirely in music. She wants desperately to be accepted."

Lest these observations lead to the impression that Ella is a subject for the analyst's couch, let it be made clear that she is a happy extrovert whom her fellow-workers consider one of the gang, a whiz at tonk or blackjack when the cards are pulled out on bus trips. She is also endowed with many of the naively enthusiastic qualities of one of her own fans. ("Do you know who caught the show the other night? Judy Holliday -- and she came backstage afterward to see me! And she went on and on about how she liked me! Imagine that -- Judy Holliday!") Once when a restaurant owner for whom she had just tape-recorded an interview picked up the check for her dinner she expressed astonishment and intense gratitude, as if this gesture were without precedent.

Constantly contributing to the support of a number of relatives and friends, and quietly generous with her earnings, Ella has never been money-minded. Her accountant now has her on a weekly allowance; much of the rest of her earnings goes into a special savings account. Her weekly night club stipend now is never less than $5000; this year she will probably gross a cool quarter-million.

Her imperviousness to all this is best illustrated by an incident backstage at the Copa soon after her opening last spring. Several people had buttonholed her at once, her press agent and a woman who, with her two daughters, had just caught the show. The dialogue went roughly as follows:

Agent: Ella, I have terrific news for you!

Ella: Yes? Say, have you met this lady? She brought her daughters with her, and she says she has all my records and ----

Agent: They want you back in the Copa next year and this time you're going to headline the show!

Ella: Gee, that's swell. Say, Virginia, did you know this lady's two daughters buy my records too, and they came all the way from Paramus, N. J., to see me?

Agent: Not only that, they want you for four weeks instead of two!

Ella: Imagine -- all the way from Paramus, N. J.! Virginia, hand me some paper so I can sign some autographs for this lady and her daughters!

Ella's modesty and graciousness extend to her professional life as well. "Some actresses will insist on showing their good profile and upstaging others," Granz points out. "Ella is just the opposite. When she made the album with Armstrong she insisted that he select the tunes, and sang them all in his keys even if they were the wrong keys for her. She defers completely to other people. She'll apologize for even the slightest goof, where most artists would blame (and curse out) the orchestra. She'll say 'I'm sorry, fellas, that was my fault,' when actually her little fluff comes on the heels of 10 goofs by the fiddle players."

But perhaps the real indication of Ella's stature was voiced immediately after the historic night at the Hollywood Bowl, when the classic tribute to great performers was paid by the concertmaster of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. "Ella Fitzgerald," he said, "could sing the Van Nuys telephone directory with a broken jaw and make it sound good. And that," he added, "is a particularly dull telephone directory."

Top: during the recording session at Verve, Duke ponders a run-through chorus of Take the "A" Train, while side-kick Billy Strayhorn shouts for more guts from the brass.

Left: Miss Fitzgerald listens dreamily to strains of Ellington's Sophisticated Lady.

Below: Duke jokes with Ella during break in rehearsal of Don't Get Around Much Anymore;

Dizzy Gillespie, the man with the upswept horn, dropped by to dig the sounds, stayed to wail on wax behind Ella.

Right: Strayhorn, Verve prexy Norman Granz and the Duke talk over timing problems on the four-disc LP package.

Lower right: long-time Ellington sax star Johnny Hodges takes ten between takes.