Artist

Ella Fitzgerald

American jazz singer

Kaifeng, People's Republic of China · 1917 – 1996

Ella Fitzgerald is a musician from Kaifeng, People's Republic of China, active 1917–1996. Their discography on Gatefold includes 24 records.

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Albums tracked

369

In collections

1917

Since

Biography

Chick Webb had to be bribed to audition her because she showed up at the Savoy in oversized boots and a threadbare dress looking like she'd been living on the street, which she literally was. Then she opened her mouth and Webb hired her on the spot to cut sides through one shitty carbon mic while he beat the hell out of his snare behind her. Most people think of her as polite mid-century dinner music. That's pure bullshit. She survived the cutthroat Savoy battle-of-the-bands circuit, took over Webb's entire big band after his spine gave out, and ran it herself before most women in this country could open their own bank account. By the late forties, big bands were dying and Decca kept forcing her to cut corny novelty pop records that wasted her range. Instead of folding, she locked into 52nd Street, learned what the horn players were doing with bebop, and turned her voice into an actual brass instrument. Norman Granz eventually bought out her Decca contract, dropped her into the studio with big catalogs of classic American sheet music, and let her strip away the melodrama. She didn't weep through a lyric like Billie Holiday; she sang with an impossibly clean, razor-sharp pitch and swing that showed the composers what their own charts were actually supposed to sound like.

Bio from The Clerk

The Arc of Ella Fitzgerald

The pivots — what forced Ella Fitzgerald to reinvent.

The Savoy Ballroom Swing Era
After winning amateur night at the Apollo, teenager Ella got pushed in front of drummer Chick Webb and spent the late 1930s cutting high-octane swing sides. Webb gave her the platform, and when they cut 'A-Tisket, A-Tasket' in 1938, it exploded into an inescapable national radio hit. When Webb died of spinal tuberculosis in 1939, she stepped up to lead Ella Fitzgerald and Her Famous Orchestra through brutal touring schedules. You hear a young singer on those early 78s holding her own against one of the loudest, hardest-driving rhythm sections in Harlem.
Bebop and Scat Mastery
Post-war swing band economics cratered, so Ella pivoted to small combos and began hanging around Dizzy Gillespie's modernist circle. She stopped mimicking pop crooners and started copying horn lines, turning scat from a novelty trick into an airtight masterclass of phrasing and improvisation. Tracks like 'Flyin' Home' and 'Lady Be Good' on Decca revealed a singer operating at the exact same technical velocity as modern jazz saxophonists. You hear a total abandonment of conventional balladry in favor of lightning-fast harmonic shifts.
The Songbook Volumes
Norman Granz pulled Ella over to Verve in 1956 specifically to record definitive, encyclopedic runs of Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Duke Ellington, and the Gershwins. Stripping away the novelty tunes, she was backed by massive arrangements from guys like Nelson Riddle and Duke Ellington himself. These multi-LP box sets turned her into an international standard-bearer of American popular songwriting. On record, her phrasing is pristine and dead-center on the pitch, serving the composer's text without burying it in vocal theatrics.
Ella and Pops
Granz stuck Ella in a studio with Louis Armstrong and Oscar Peterson's rhythm section to cut small-group duets like 1956's 'Ella and Louis.' Armstrong's gravel-throated, behind-the-beat phrasing acted as the perfect foil to Ella's bright, effortless intonation. They didn't rehearse for weeks or overthink arrangements; they simply shared a room and let the natural friction between their vocal textures do the work. The recordings capture two genuine masters bantering and trading bars like old friends over an upright piano.

Influences

Connee Boswell — Ella explicitly stated in interviews that she tried to sound exactly like Boswell when she first started out, citing the Boswell Sisters' 1934 record 'The Object of My Affection' as the reason she sang. You can hear Boswell's signature sliding pitch and precise syncopation baked into Ella's early Savoy vocal lines. If Boswell hadn't laid that blueprint down on shellac, Fitzgerald might never have stepped onto that Apollo stage.
Louis Armstrong — Before they cut classic duet LPs for Verve, Armstrong was the primary architect of jazz scatting who Fitzgerald studied on 78s as a kid. You hear his syncopated rhythmic drive and percussive phrasing inside every extended bop solo Ella tracked in the late 1940s. He invented the vocabulary she later took to technical perfection.
Chick Webb — Webb brought Ella into his Savoy orchestra in 1935 and schooled her in the ruthless discipline of live swing tempo. His pounding, razor-sharp drum time forced her to anchor her vocals firmly inside the pocket without dragging. That relentless Savoy rhythm became the foundation of her entire sense of swing.
Bessie Smith — Smith's massive 1920s Columbia catalog set the standard for vocal authority and phrasing through cheap carbon microphones. You hear that earthy, room-commanding projection whenever Ella tackled straightforward 12-bar blues numbers like 'These Are the Blues.' It gave her sweet upper register a necessary dose of raw power.
Duke Ellington — Ellington's 1920s and 30s Cotton Club charts defined the sophisticated orchestral harmonies that Fitzgerald internalized long before they ever cut an album together. When she tackled his catalog for the 1957 Verve Song Book sessions, she treated his brass voicings as melodic guide rails. She didn't just sing his tunes; she understood the complex architecture of how he wrote for horns.