Ella Fitzgerald

Ella Fitzgerald was discovered when, still a teenager, she was singing on the stage of a small musical theatre in the famous Harlem, New York. She was hired as a vocal soloist of Chick Webb's band, with whom she recorded in 1935, at only seventeen, her first successful album, called "Love and Kisses". She sang with them until Webb's death, when she became the leader of the band. Later on she sang with many other different orchestras or pianists, in nightclubs, theatres or concerts. The clarity and the sonority of her bell-like voice where beautifully intertwined with a brilliant interpretation.

The "classical" period of Ella Fitzgerald's art began in April 1958, when she gave some concerts at Carnagie Hall in New York with Duke Ellington, with whom she recorded then the four LP's called "Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Song Book". From the sentimentalism of her early years, the singer reached at this time the severe intellectual discipline of the mature artist, master of her own means of expression, changing the ethnic and local characteristics of the jazz and pop music into esthetic and universal ones.

Although she never imitated any other singer, Ella Fitzgerald's was much under the influence of Connie Boswell, a jazz and pop singer of the thirties, who gained her reputation as the soloist of Benny Goodman, Red Nichols and Don Redman's orchestras. Probably because her repertoire includes many American hits, she was considered more as a star of the pop music, than an artist of the jazz music. Nat Hentoff, for example, has the sixties and seventies, although she won countless important prizes at the contests of the jazz magazines "Metronome" and "Down Beat".

Oana Sacalus
"D. Zamfirescu" School, Focsani, Romania
Teacher: Petru Dumitru <petrudumitru@netscape.net>