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BECOMING ELLA FITZGERALD

Judith Tick

The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song

A landmark biography that reclaims Ella Fitzgerald as a major American artist and modernist innovator.

Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996) possessed one of the twentieth century's most astonishing voices. In this first major biography since Fitzgerald's death, music historian Judith Tick draws on deep archival research, family interviews, and newly available recordings and concert footage to show how Fitzgerald fused a Black vocal aesthetic with mainstream popular repertoire to revolutionize American music. From Fitzgerald's first audition at the Apollo Theater to swing-era success at the Savoy, Tick shows how this "girl singer" broke new ground: as a female bandleader, as a groundbreaking bebop improviser, and as the arbiter of the American canon with her Song Book recordings. Yet even as she electrified concert halls and sold millions of records, jazz critics belittled her as "naive." Tick reveals instead an ambitious risk-taker with a stunningly diverse repertoire, whose exceptional musical spontaneity (often radically different on stage than in the studio) made her a transformational artist. Judith Tick is professor emerita of music history at Northeastern University. She has published award-winning books and articles about American music and women's history in music, including Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer's Search for Music. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

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Book Published 2023-12-05 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. - New York (USA)

Comments

This biography about the legendary singer and band leader - "the First Lady of Song" (1917-1996) - describes a shy young woman who first found success onstage at an amateur night competition at the Apollo, then went on to a stellar career and acclaim for her stunning vocal talent and improvisational skills. Read more...

[Tick] exposes speculation, fills fissures with fact, and finds a fresh feminist heroine of transformative authority.

More than a decade in the making, Becoming Ella Fitzgerald is a biography truly worthy of the 'First Lady of Song'.

[A] comprehensive and fascinating biography of an American music titan... Essential for casual fans of jazz and music history and Fitzgerald aficionados alike, this thoroughly impressive work will be hard to equal. As masterful and wonderful as its subject.

#1 Best Seller in Jazz Music on Amazon

Ella Fitzgerald made becoming a great artist seem effortless. She hid her will, her drive, and her originality behind the mask of a modest, soft-spoken woman. Now, at last, Judith Tick shows exactly how Fitzgerald explored and shaped every form of American popular music. In the process she thwarted all the boundaries of class, race, and gender that threatened to confine her. Tick's musical knowledge is impeccable; so are her reporting and her scholarship. 'I won't be left behind,' Fitzgerald used to vow. This stirringly complete biography ensures that she never will be.

In this radiant, rich, no-stone-unturned biography, Judith Tick shows us how Ella Fitzgerald 'became' not only one of America's greatest vocalists but a brilliant innovator who forever changed the status of 'the female singer' in her time and beyond.

Remarkable... [O]pens up whole areas of her story that have seldom been explored in print, and in the process reveals a woman whose exceptional artistry infused a bewildering variety of material with a touch of genius.

A magisterial biography... rendered in luxuriant prose... This is a superior addition to the shelf on America's jazz legends.

At last, we know where Ella came from and how she became our beloved First Lady of Song. Becoming Ella Fitzgerald is a first-rate job of research and a great read.

Spanish: Libros de Kultrum

[I]ncisive, doggedly researched... [Tick] proves an ideal guide to Fitzgerald's perpetual progress. She translates what she hears with lyrical clarity, describing the "honey-mustard blend" of Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong's voices on their classic duets. On her subject's rendition of "Almost Like Being in Love," Tick writes, "Fitzgerald purged sentimentality in an arrangement punctuated with brassy dissonance and bite. Her interpretation had subtle jazz phrasing, inflected melodic alterations, and inimitable swing. Read more...

Becoming Ella Fitzgerald is a treasure - a comprehensive, deeply researched, and documented biography that finally gives Ella the complexity and depth that she deserves. Placing Fitzgerald in the intersection of race and gender at mid-twentieth century and overturning often repeated half-truths about her life and career, Tick highlights the beauty and artistry of Fitzgerald's voice and the full range of her genre-crossing career. Becoming Ella Fitzgerald is essential reading for anyone interested in the Ella, jazz, or American popular culture.

Tick illuminates the artist and her experiences with precision, insight, and fluency... defining, revelatory, and invaluable biography.

Judith Tick's much-needed updated biography uses new research and keen musicology, and brings forth a revealing and fully convincing portrait of Lady Ella as visionary, social activist, and still-modern singer.