I've been listening to Ella Fitzgerald music all day long. Not that I need an excuse to do that, but today is April 25, which is her birthday.
I've mentioned before that I was lucky enough to attend her last performance in New York City in 1992. Now, twenty-two years later, and nearly two decades after her death, having seen her just once makes me feel connected to an era that was gone long before I was even born.
I would love to have been a regular at Birdland, seen Billie at Storyville, swung with Ella and Dinah at Newport. On the other hand, I enjoy being able to survey their careers in retrospect and get to hear all kinds of treasures unearthed from the vaults of their record labels. It appeals to the pack rat/archivist in me. Why, just a few years ago Verve released four hours of previously unissued Ella club dates from '61 and '62. If I'd been born one of her contemporaries, I would never have had the chance to hear them.
One of the smartest people I know, with pretty exquisite taste, dismisses Ella because she "ran around singing about her little yellow basket" while Billie was running a cold chill down the spine with songs like Strange Fruit and Black and Blue. Fair enough, but on the other hand Billie didn't lead her own orchestra at the age of twenty-two like Ella did, she didn't have perfect pitch, she didn't scat, and she didn't swing nearly as brightly as Ella, in my opinion. Perhaps the most important distinction (and this is not a recrimination of Billie) is that Ella managed to stay alive and performing well into her seventies. In the world of mid century jazz, awash in drug abuse, racism, and sketchy contracts, that's no small accomplishment.
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