Arte gives to see and hear Ella Fitzgerald, dazzling glory of jazz with incredible longevity

An interesting documentary but a little too general recalls the long, rich and worldwide career of the one who was nicknamed the “Callas of jazz”. An evening followed by the concert given at the Montreux festival in 1975.

This is the story of a young Afro -American arrived in New York at the age of 2, in 1919, with her family who fled the racism and misery of the Southern States. Orphan at 15, she was abused by her stepfather, ran away, was locked in a reformatory, suffered further violence there, ran away again…

Until that blessed day that was November 21, 1934, which the documentary Ella Fitzgerald, Just One of Those Things, by Leslie Woodhead evokes in an introductory way: the teenage girl a little plump shows up in an amateur contest, in a dirty, torn dress, on stage at the Apollo Theater in Harlem; she intends to dance but changes her mind and sings instead.

On the balcony, people laugh at her and heckle. “Then we heard this tone of voice, this perfect sound: we put it right away”, recalls Norma Miller (1919-2019), a dancer who was to become the friend and colleague of the singer, who died almost a hundred years old, between the shooting and the broadcast of this documentary.

It would be an exaggeration to say that in those early years everything Ella was there, already: the voice is still childish, Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996 ) will recognize it itself later. But from the first concerts and records of her dazzling, rich and long career – she will sing again after a heart operation, in 1986 -, everything that will make the greatness of this artist is already more than in embryo.

Capricant virtuosity

This talent is due to a legato and an ambitus which would have allowed him to sing Richard Strauss’s last Four Lieder, with a phrasing as airborne, with a timbre of an incredible luscious beauty . And to a capricious virtuosity which then makes her, after Louis Armstrong, the most stunning improviser of onomatopoeic sequences of “scat”.

The career and life of the singer are quite completely covered by this documentary: her adherence to various styles, her personal loneliness, her world glory, the racist prejudices of which she was the victim, her relationship with her manager Norman Granz (1918-2001), who created the Verve label in 1956 and had him record with orchestra the most beautiful pages of the Great American Songbook (great repertoire of American song for Broadway and Hollywood).

But we can regret that never the one who was certainly the first and the best known internationally – but not the only one – of the great jazz singers, was not placed in a broader perspective, as if Billie Holiday or Sarah Vaughan, among others, did not did not exist. And we would have liked to hear more from certain speakers – the pianist André Previn, for example.

We can finally regret the decision of dubious taste to have someone sing, at the end of the film, on the stage from the empty Apollo Theater, a young singer of 16 years – Alexis Morrast -, in order to make a kind of pendant to the hearing of Fitzgerald, in the same places and at the same age.

But spend an hour and a half in the company of this immense artist (and even more if you want to continue with the concert that Arte offers in the wake, in 00:15) is a pleasure that does not sulk. Because, as British singer and jazz pianist Jamie Cullum puts it nicely, Ella Fitzgerald is definitely “one of those things that makes life on earth fun…”.

/Le Monde Report. View in full here.