Becoming Ella Fitzgerald

The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song

Judith Tick

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English

Norton
14 April 2025

Music; Individual composers & musicians, bands & groups; Biography: arts & entertainment

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.

By: Judith Tick
Imprint: Norton
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 211mm, Width: 140mm, Spine: 28mm
Weight: 443g
ISBN: 9781324105220
ISBN 10: 1324105224
Pages: 608
Publication Date: 14 April 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

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.

Reviews for Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song

""Becoming Ella Fitzgerald is the biography that passionate jazz fans have been waiting for.… A magisterial new understanding of the great artist’s career."" -- Will Friedwald, music journalist and author of The Great Jazz and Pop Vocal Album ""[Tick] proves an ideal guide to Fitzgerald’s perpetual progress. She translates what she hears with lyrical clarity."" -- Chris Vognar - Los Angeles Times ""Thoughtful and thorough…[Becoming Ella Fitzgerald] trace[s] the singer through the vast variety of songs she sang, songs that not only defined Fitzgerald’s career but which came to define what it is to be a jazz singer."" -- Eric Felten - Wall Street Journal ""Becoming Ella Fitzgerald…succeeds in arguing that Fitzgerald’s legacy lies, in part, in how she forced an entire industry to become more accepting of talent—however it appears or sounds."" -- Economist ""Tick’s musical knowledge is impeccable; so are her reporting and her scholarship."" -- Margo Jefferson, author of Constructing a Nervous System ""Becoming Ella Fitzgerald is a first-rate job of research and a great read."" -- Dan Morgenstern, director emeritus, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University ""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."" -- Alyn Shipton, host of BBC jazz programs and research fellow at the Royal Academy of Music ""[Judith Tick] exposes speculation, fills fissures with fact, and finds a fresh feminist heroine of transformative authority."" -- John McDonough, senior contributor, Down Beat ""[Becoming Ella Fitzgerald] brings forth a revealing and fully convincing portrait of Lady Ella as visionary, social activist, and still modern singer."" -- John Szwed, author of Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth ""A touchstone for Fitzgerald’s legion of fans, past, present, and future."" -- Ricky Riccardi, author of What a Wonderful World ""Becoming Ella Fitzgerald is a treasure—a comprehensive, deeply researched, and documented biography that finally gives Ella the complexity and depth that she deserves."" -- Ingrid Monson, author of Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa ""A magisterial biography…rendered in luxuriant prose.… This is a superior addition to the shelf on America’s jazz legends."" -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) ""[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."" -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) ""Tick illuminates the artist and her experiences with precision, insight, and fluency…. A defining, revelatory, and invaluable biography."" -- Donna Seaman - Booklist (starred review)