[Dixielandjazz] A Valentine to Ella - Boston Globe

[Robert Ringwald]

Ella Fitzgerald
A Valentine to Ella
Her singing makes you believe love makes sense
by Joan Wickersham
Boston Globe, February 10, 2012
There may have been a St. Valentine among the martyrs of ancient Rome, but to my
mind the patron saint of Valentine's Day is Ella Fitzgerald.
The first time I heard Ella singing I was in college, going from door to door conducting
some survey for a sociology class. In one of the dorm rooms, music was playing: a
woman's voice that was so smooth, so smart, that I interrupted the sociological question-and-answer
session to ask, "What is this?"
It was Ella. The song was a dopey one: a coy ditty about gradually giving in to the
pleading of an irresistibly seductive man -- a lover, you think; but no, he turns
out to be a guy selling magazine subscriptions. Ella made this unpromising material
into something memorable: witty and delicious.
Over the 50-plus years of her long career, Ella sang everything, from novelty songs
(her first great success was with "A-Tisket, A-Tasket"), to jazz, swing, blues, and
bebop. But the heart of her work -- both in terms of how much she recorded and how
definitive her performances were -- was the repertoire known as the Great American
Songbook: ballads and show tunes by Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Richard
Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Duke Ellington, Jerome Kern, Johnny Mercer, and Harold Arlen.
Many of the great women singers recorded this material, and each of them brought
something different (and wonderful) to it. When you listen to Billie Holiday sing
a love song, you're listening to a woman who's been hurt over and over again. She's
not just singing about a case of heartbreak; she's singing about heartbreak as a
perpetual state of being. With Dinah Washington, you hear a kind of indomitable savvy.
Nobody breaks her heart and gets away with it. If you try to kick her, she'll just
kick you right back, step over you, and move on.
But with Ella, what you hear is intelligent, faithful, romantic love. You hear monogamy.
She sounds like she met a man, fell in love with him, and stayed with him. When she
sings, "Love is as solid as the rock of Gibraltar," you believe her. Her voice is
full of tenderness, affection, and humor. You believe, listening to Ella, that love
makes sense.
It didn't always in her private life. Singing is not autobiography. Ella had two
short and unhappy marriages, one of them to a drug dealer, and she was also romantically
involved with a young Norwegian swindler who wound up in prison. In company she generally
felt awkward and shy. "I think I do better when I sing," she said.
She kept her personal life separate from her vocal persona, and people who don't
like Ella often criticize her for not bringing enough personality to a song. But
I think her restraint actually says a lot about her personality and her judgment.
She is the most relaxed and tactful of singers, and what she is really doing is getting
out of the song's way. Listening to her, I forget that I'm hearing a singer at all.
She just lets the song sing itself. Ira Gershwin once said, "I never knew how good
our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them."
Ella sang about love, not sex. Her overtly sexy songs never quite work, somehow.
Her version of Cole Porter's "Let's Do It" sounds like a catalog of facts, albeit
amusing facts, from a biology class. When she sings "Baby It's Cold Outside" it sounds
like her reason for staying inside with the man has to do with central heating. (Ray
Charles and Betty Carter, in contrast, make it meltingly clear what it has to do
with. And no discussion of sexy songs, however brief, can leave out Alberta Hunter
singing on "Amtrak Blues" about her handyman.)
But again, Ella's power has to do with restraint. She recorded much of her greatest
work in the 1940s and '50s, but there is something refreshingly subtle about it today,
when song lyrics tend to equate passion with bluntness. "Each day is Valentine's
Day." The words are simple, maybe even sappy, but Ella's voice somehow turns them
into a rich story about the private life between lovers, where so much happens behind
closed doors.


--Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
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