Becoming Ella Fitzgerald
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A01=Judith Tick
amateur night at the appollo
Author_Judith Tick
blues
Category=AVLP
Category=AVP
Category=DNBF
cultural biography
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_music
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
great american songbook
jazz
music biography
music history
pop
r b
rhythm blues
rock and roll
rock roll
soul
swing
twentieth century music
Product details
- ISBN 9781324105220
- Weight: 443g
- Dimensions: 140 x 211mm
- Publication Date: 04 Feb 2025
- Publisher: WW Norton & Co
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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 revolutionise American music. From Fitzgerald’s first audition at the Apollo Theatre to swing-era success at the Savoy, Tick shows how this “girl singer” broke new ground: as a female bandleader, as a ground-breaking 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 “naïve”. 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 American Music. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, and Studio City, California.
