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Becoming Ella Fitzgerald : 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, historian Judith Tick offers a sublime portrait of this ambitious risk-taker whose exceptional musical spontaneity made her a transformational artist. Becoming Ella Fitzgerald clears up long-enduring mysteries. Archival research and in-depth family interviews shed new light on the singer's difficult childhood in Yonkers, New York, the tragic death of her mother, and the year she spent in a girls' reformatory school -- where she sang in its renowned choir and dreamed of being a dancer. Rarely seen profiles from the Black press offer precious glimpses of Fitzgerald's tense experiences of racial discrimination and her struggles with constricting models of Black and white femininity at midcentury. Tick's compelling narrative depicts Fitzgerald's complicated career in fresh and original detail, upending the traditional view that segregates vocal jazz from the genre's mainstream. As she navigated the shifting tides between jazz and pop, she used her originality to pioneer modernist vocal jazz. Interpreting long-lost setlists, reviews from both white and Black newspapers, and newly released footage and recordings, the book explores how Ella's transcendence as an improvisor produced onstage performances every bit as significant as her historic recorded oeuvre. From the singer's first performance at the Apollo Theatre's famous \"Amateur Night\" to the Savoy Ballroom, where Fitzgerald broke through with Chick Webb's big band in the 1930s, Tick evokes the jazz world in riveting detail. She describes how Ella helped shape the bebop movement in the 1940s, as she joined Dizzy Gillespie and her then-husband, Ray Brown, in the world-touring Jazz at the Philharmonic, one of the first moments of high-culture acceptance for the disreputable art form. Breaking ground as a female bandleader, Fitzgerald refuted expectations of musical Blackness, deftly balancing artistic ambition and market expectations. Her legendary exploration of the Great American Songbook in the 1950s fused a Black vocal aesthetic and jazz improvisation to revolutionize the popular repertoire. This hybridity often confounded critics, yet throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Ella reached audiences around the world, electrifying concert halls, and sold millions of records. A masterful biography, Becoming Ella Fitzgerald describes a powerful woman who set a standard for American excellence nearly unmatched in the twentieth century.
Book
Billie Holiday : wishing on the moon
Based on unrivaled access to archival interviews with those who knew her at every stage of her life, the most revealing biography of the incomparable Lady Day.
eBook
Rebel girls. Episode 19, Nina Simone
This Rebel Girl was an icon of American music, a musician who used her talent to inspire others, writing songs of freedom and protest. We discover who Nina Simone was. Based on the best-selling books 'Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls'.
Streaming Video
Princess Noire
Born Eunice Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina, Nina Simone (1933-2003) began her musical life playing classical piano. A child prodigy, she wanted a career on the concert stage, but when the Curtis Institute of Music rejected her, the devastating disappointment compelled her to change direction. She turned to popular music and jazz but never abandoned her classical roots or her intense ambition. By the age of twenty six, Simone had sung at New York City's venerable Town Hall and was on her way. Tapping into newly unearthed material on Simone's family and career, Nadine Cohodas paints a luminous portrait of the singer, highlighting her tumultuous life, her innovative compositions, and the prodigious talent that matched her ambition.With precision and empathy, Cohodas weaves the story of Simone's contentious relationship with audiences and critics, her outspoken support for civil rights, her two marriages and her daughter, and, later, the sense of alienation that drove her to live abroad from 1993 until her death. Alongside these threads runs a more troubling one: Simone's increasing outbursts of rage and pain that signaled mental illness and a lifelong struggle to overcome a deep sense of personal injustice.
eBook
Queen of bebop : the musical lives of Sarah Vaughan
An account of the life of the influential jazz singer and civil rights advocate shares insights into her contributions as an African-American artist, drawing on inside sources to discuss her creative process and challenge misperceptions about her character.
Book
Jazz Musicians, 1945 to the Present
From its very beginnings, the nature of jazz has been to reinvent itself.As the musical genre evolved from its roots--blues, European music, Voodoo ceremonies, and brass bands that played at funerals, parades and celebrations--the sound reflected the tenor of the times, from the citified strains of the Roaring '20s to the Big Band swing of.
eBook
Ella Fitzgerald
Presents information about Ella Fitzgerald, from her youth mired in tragedy to her rise to stardom as one of the top jazz singers of all time.
Book
Billie Holiday: wishing on the moon
Certainly no singer has been more mythologized and more misunderstood than Billie Holiday, who helped to create much of the mystique herself with her autobiography,Lady Sings the Blues. \"Now, finally, we have a definitive biography,\" saidBooklistof Donald Clarke'sBillie Holiday, \"by a deeply compassionate, respectful, and open-minded biographer [whose] portrait embraces every facet of Holiday's paradoxical nature, from her fierceness to her vulnerability, her childlikeness to her innate elegance and amazing strength.\" Clarke was given unrivaled access to a treasure trove of interviews from the 1970s-interviews with those who knew Lady Day from her childhood in the streets and good-time houses of Baltimore through the early days of success in New York and into the years of fame, right up to her tragic decline and death at the age of forty-four. Clarke uses these interviews to separate fact from fiction and, in the words of theSeattle Times, \"finally sets us straight. . .evoking her world in all its anguish, triumph, force and irony.\"Newsdaycalled this \"a thoroughly riveting account of Holiday and her milieu.\" TheNew York Timesraved that it \"may be the most thoroughly valuable of the many books on Holiday,\" and Helen Oakley Dance inJazzTimessaid, \"We should probably have to wait a long time for another life of Billie Holiday to supersede Donald Clarke's achievement.\"
eBook