SHE SCATS
This programme contains some strong language
# I'm going out
# I'm gonna rave and shout
# I wanna go out, I wanna go out
# We are gonna go way out
# Way...
# ..out with the boys from Ipanema. #
SHE SCATS
# Fly me to the moon
# And let me see what's way up there
# Take me to the moon
# I wanna go way, way up there
# I wanna see what's up there
# Way, way, way, way, way, way up in the moon, yeah
# We're gonna do the moonwalk
# Got to do the moonwalk
# Got to do the moonwalk... #
All the greats came here. Everyone.
And we went through these doors and you were, where...?
You were in Harlem! Harlem.
It was November of 1934, when Norma Miller, who is 100 years old now,
first heard a skinny teenage girl sing.
A shabby street kid entered Amateur Night at the Apollo.
The girl has never sung in public.
She's shaking.
Her dress is dirty.
The audience laughed at her. LAUGHTER
They introduced this new girl called Ella Fitzgerald.
We booed her!
Cos they were introducing somebody we didn't know,
and we were all kids, a bunch of rowdy teenagers in the balcony.
"Oh, we don't want..." We were mad anyway.
Boo! Say, can you imagine, we booed Ella Fitzgerald?!
ELLA: We went to the Apollo
and I was the one who was chosen.
My legs were so skinny.
I used to wear boots so nobody could see the bottom of my legs!
She's just 16.
Ella has survived the death of her beloved mother,
a brutal reform school, and a homeless life in the Harlem streets.
But she's tough. She likes a dare.
And she wants to dance.
At the Apollo, she takes her chances.
I was what they called, you know,
the greatest little dancer in Yonkers.
And there were two sisters
who were the dancing-est sisters in the world
called The Edwards Sisters.
And they were starring at the Apollo
and when I saw those ladies dance, I says,
"No way I'm going out there and try to dance,"
because they stopped the show. LAUGHTER
And the man said, "You're out here." He says, "Well, do something."
And I sang -
# If her voice can bring
# Every hope of the spring, that's Judy. #
And everybody says, "Oh, that girl can sing."
APPLAUSE
It was like one of those defining moments where...
"I'm here, I have to do something.
"Something has to be accomplished."
And to be able to pull out of you, out of yourself, something...
..that...magical, you know, that's...
That is pretty amazing.
And we heard a sound, I'm telling you, she was...
It was so perfect. I said, "She shut us up so quick,
"you can hear a rat piss on cotton."
And that was the story of Ella Fitzgerald.
# It was just
# One of those things
# Just one of those cra-zy flings... #
I was always looking for heroes.
# Bells that now and then ring... #
Icons that looked like me.
# Just one of those things... #
A black woman that...
..was really black.
# It was great fun, but it was just... #
She made it seem like anything was possible.
There's no other Ella. Sorry. SHE LAUGHS
# Just one of those things. #
APPLAUSE
Ella Fitzgerald's life was always about moving on.
In 1919, when Ella was two, the family left Virginia for New York.
They joined the Great Migration,
tens of millions of African-Americans
who fled the racism and the poverty of the South.
The Great Migration was bringing so many people,
like Ella's mother, all with economic dreams, cultural dreams,
social dreams.
The world would have been opening up.
Ella's mother, Tempie, settled the family in Yonkers,
a few miles north of Harlem.
NEWSCASTER: Heart of Harlem,
the largest coloured city in the world, with a population of 220,000.
The action for black teenagers is in Harlem.
From Yonkers, it's only a tram
and a five-cent subway train to get there.
EXCITED CHATTER
# Hurry
# Hurry, hurry
# Get, get, get, get, get, get, get, get
# Come on!
# You must take the A train
# If you really want to go to Harlem
# Come on and take...
# Take the A train... # Thank you.
# Find the quickest way to get to Harlem
# Hurry, hurry, boy, it's coming
# Can't you hear those engines strumming?
# All aboard, get on the A train.
# You'll find the quickest way to get to Harlem. #
SHE SCATS
The earliest story I have from her lips to my ears,
she said she used to dance on the street corners of Harlem
for nickels, she and her friend Charles.
I wanted to be a dancer and I ran away from home.
But I got out there and I got hungry
and I was glad to get back home
and I was glad when my mother whipped me.
I was just so glad to know that I had a home to come to,
a warm bed and, brother, that was it.
Ella Fitzgerald is coming into Harlem when it was
the high point of what we now call the Black Renaissance,
the Harlem Renaissance.
There were all these theatres
and there were, you know, fully staged reviews.
It was this very, very unique occurrence that never really
happened anywhere else or in any other time.
It was just this incredible flowering of African-American
musical talent that was, you know,
concentrated in this very small, specific area of just a few blocks.
One of the lovely things about the Renaissance is this,
this mixture of music.
OK, so of course, you are hearing blues,
of course you are hearing original jazz compositions.
You are also hearing musical theatre,
songs of the day, and those are all in the mix.
So, Ella is taking it in and getting ready to join the swing age.
All the bands were on the radio.
Duke Ellington made a point to be on the radio,
and Louis Armstrong was all over the airwaves.
# Dinah, with her Dixie eyes blazin'
# Love to sit and gaze in
# To the eyes of Dinah Lee
# Every night
# My, I shake with fright, oh
# Cos my Dinah might
# Change her mind... # HE SCATS
Louis Armstrong is the only major scat singer before Ella Fitzgerald.
He definitely was a big influence on Ella.
The Broadway theatres are lit up with new musicals.
Everyone listens to the songs on the radio, including a teenage Ella.
Everybody calls it, to this day, the Great American Song Book.
And that's Gershwin, Irving Berlin and Cole Porter.
And all the great ones.
# They're writing songs of love
# But not for me... #
All the greatest songs that everybody loves, to this day...
# A lucky star's above... #
Ella is hearing the young composers
whose music she will be doing in song books years later.
# With love to lead the way... #
She is hearing Irving Berlin songs, she's hearing Rodgers and Hart,
she's hearing wonderful Harold Arlen.
She's hearing all of that being sung by black singers as well as white.
# Than any Russian play
# Could guarantee... #
And people would think, "Oh, those little, dumb little Tin Pan Alley, moon-June-spoon songs,"
but this became, not only the soundtrack of the 20th century,
but helped to define it in a sense that became the American
equivalent of classical music, you know?
Where the Europeans have Bach and Beethoven, we have Jerome Kern,
and Cole Porter and Duke Ellington.
# I guess he's not
# For
# Me. #
I was raised with the Jazz Age, so all I ever heard was jazz.
So, it was natural for me. I just...
Me and jazz came up together.
For kids like Ella and Norma,
the jazz music and the dancing are an escape
from lives shaped by poverty and racism.
Now, my mother got two babies, 20 years old, unskilled,
never had a job...
You had to find a way of getting money.
You can't work for nobody because - remember - slavery is over.
You don't have jobs.
How do you pay the rent?
My mother used to give house rent parties.
"Norma could dance."
She threw me out on the stage so I could entertain her people,
so she could charge for pig feet and potato salad.
And that's how I started in showbiz, in my mother's living room.
Everything was race.
You couldn't go to Woolworth across the street.
If you were a black person and you wanted to buy a hat,
you couldn't try it on.
They wouldn't have black girls on the cash registers.
You couldn't go out of your zone.
Right up the street was the Cotton Club.
We couldn't go in the Cotton Club
we could work in the Cotton Club, but you couldn't go in.
So the confinement left you...
What you had to do, you had to do it amongst yourselves.
"One day, you're going to see my name in lights."
In 1929, the stock market crashes,
the Great Depression hammers the country for a decade.
Millions are devastated.
By 1932, half of black Americans are out of work.
There are whites who insist black workers are fired,
the whites given their jobs.
For Ella Fitzgerald, there is also personal tragedy.
The big divide in Ella's life was the tragedy of losing her mother
when she was 13 years old.
She describes her mother in very loving terms
and kept a picture of her mother in her home.
Tempie was a formidable woman and it was a devastating blow
because her mother had been the continuity in her life.
And Ella was lost.
Friends said Ella's stepfather neglected her
and there were rumours of abuse.
Her aunt in Harlem took her in.
Ella - hurt, angry, lost - ran away.
Cops picked her up off the street.
She runs away from home, she's a truant,
she gets caught and does time in a state reformatory for girls.
This is... This is brutal.
It was the combination of reform school cruelties
and the particular abuses and insults handed out
to the young black girls.
The training school for girls had begun 30 years earlier
as a home for unwed mothers.
In Ella's time, it's a reformatory for young truants.
Ella is locked up here in 1933, more than 100 miles from home.
Like other black girls, she is beaten by male staff
and held in solitary confinement.
Ella never spoke about it.
A report noted Ella Fitzgerald is "ungovernable"
and will not obey "lawful commands".
She is adjudged "delinquent".
Before long, she runs away,
back to the streets of Harlem.
MARGO: She hits the street, sleeping in little...
..nothings, you know,
doing what we see any homeless person doing,
under little piles of refuse.
And she wants to be a dancer.
Which I love. You know, "I will be a dancer!
"Even though I'm this unglamorous little critter."
Ella is back in Harlem.
It's the Apollo's first Amateur Night.
She takes the gamble.
This is her one shot.
It changes the rest of her life.
APPLAUSE
She used to say, "I kept on."
That is it. "I kept on."
In the end, once she started, she never stopped.
She lived, she survived, she became famous.
So she kept on keeping on.
At what inner price? We don't know.
NEWSCASTER: Chick Webb, king of the drums.
At the Savoy ballroom, Chick Webb is Harlem's top band leader.
Swing is all the rage.
Goodtime dance music, a break from hard lives.
Chick Webb just had a beat that was like no other.
DRUM SOLO
He swung... He swung his ass off.
Just an incredibly swinging musical drummer
and band leader.
He really knew how to lead a band with his personality
and with his musicianship.
But he was kind of faded just because of his physical handicap.
He was, you know, a dwarf and he was a hunchback.
One of his musicians tells Chick
he has to hear the girl who won at the Apollo.
The guy says, "She's scuffling in the street."
Chick Webb didn't want no girl travelling with the band,
cos you've got 16 guys.
He said, "Now, I'm not going to be taken no girl on the road,
"16 and got a bunch of horny guys. I'm not going to have it!"
They had to fight to have Ella sing with the band.
"I don't want that ugly old thing,"
Webb says when he sees Ella wearing a shabby dress and workmen's boots.
You would think that a man with tubercular spine might not be
so careless with his put-downs of Ella's looks.
But he gave her a huge start.
There are some people who are born with God-given talent...
..and then there are the rest of us.
My mother had God-given talent
and obviously that was the little seed that was planted
and someone said, "Well, let's help this garden grow."
And so, that was Chick, who was a fabulous mentor.
Ella joined Chick Webb in early 1935.
Singing with Chick's band gives her a future.
She's on a roll.
She wanted to escape the life that she had
and the way she could escape it was in show business.
# I'm just a jitterbug... #
A naive kid.
# A happy jitterbug... #
She was not cultured... She was not haute couture at all.
She was Ella.
# I'm not a corny hick, hee-hee!
# I know a real hot lick SHE SCATS
# Cos I'm a jitterbug, mighty glad that I'm alive
# Give me a solid ascender
# Not just an elbow bender
# Don't want no old-time jazz, no razzmatazz, just swing
# Cos I'm just a jitterbug
# A happy jitterbug
# A little jitter, jitter, jitterbug looking for a place to dance. #
The audience loves Ella.
She plugs into their excitement and gives it back tenfold.
# The trumpet's going crazy... #
Chick knew he had something very special with Ella.
He took her on the road with the band.
Norma Miller and half-a-dozen Lindy-hoppers were the opening act.
See, we were the young generation. She impressed us.
# And now a-listen, folks, and you will hear
# Of the drummer of the band
# Now I know he's the drummer by that drumstick in his hand... #
DRUM SOLO
NORMA: She was a girl of her time.
It's something amazing about life, your time...
She reached all of us. We were the kids coming up.
# Love and kisses never misses
# Making a heaven for two... #
Within six months, every band wants her.
She's cutting records,
singing on Benny Goodman's coast-to-coast radio show,
playing nightclubs and ballrooms
from Boston to Philly,
Chicago to New Orleans.
Guys would finish a show, they'd have a little drink
and they'd bring a big spliff on the bus and they'd all get high.
And Ella never wanted to get high. She didn't do drugs.
And she would always go all the way to the back of the bus,
she would take her coat and put it over her head
and create her own personal filtration system.
LAUGHTER
So, that's the way she took care of herself.
# Mr Paganini, please play my rhapsody... #
Then in October 1936, one of Ella's records became a hit.
# You simply have to swing it
# I said, "Swing it"
# Oh, swing it... #
She recorded Mr Paganini with Chick Webb when she was 19.
It stayed a favourite in her concerts for decades.
# With wild applause
# But what a great ovation... #
Chick Webb and his wife looked after Ella.
ELLA SCATS
But she is making her own money.
She has her own room, new clothes, even furs.
A girl on the town, Ella has plenty of admirers,
including one of President Roosevelt's sons.
I was trying to remember what was the first song
I ever remember hearing by Ella Fitzgerald.
# A-tisket a-tasket
# A brown and yellow basket... #
It was A-Tisket A-Tasket.
My sisters used to play that all day long, every day.
HE LAUGHS A-Tisket A-Tasket.
A-Tisket A-Tasket was her idea.
And it became this blockbuster hit.
# A little girlie picked it up and put it in her pocket... #
A-Tisket A-Tasket went to number one on the American hit parade.
It made Ella a national star.
And it earned her a role in a Hollywood movie.
# She was trucking on down the avenue
# With not a single thing to do
# She went a-peck, a-peck, a-pecking all around... #
I listen to my voice then, and it sounds,
well, it sounds like what I was, a little girl.
# A yellow basket... #
I laugh because my voice was so thin and small,
but I guess it is like anything else,
you mature and I'm grateful for those thin, small,
childish voice because without that, nothing could have happened.
# Oh, dear, I wish that little girl, I could see... #
She was no different from her singing.
She was understated, she was shy, she was like a little girl.
# A-tisket a-tasket, love my little... #
# My little yellow basket. #
As Lena Horne famously said after that record,
"A whole generation of us girl singers went looking for that damn yellow basket."
Ella was voted America's number-one vocalist.
Just four years after he first met the teenager,
Chick's fortunes were also skyrocketing.
And Chick knew it was because of Ella.
Together, they recorded a string of novelty numbers.
NEWSCASTER: Ella really goes to town with Chew-Chew-Chew (Your Bubble Gum).
# Chew, chew, chew, chew your bubble gum
# Chew, chew, chew, chew your bubble gum. #
That's been the music of Chick Webb and His Orchestra coming to you...
But Chick Webb is struggling with health problems.
He was a feisty individual.
He was the meanest...
See, we didn't understand, he was just always mean.
Well, because he was always in pain.
We didn't... We just didn't know it.
All those years, his playing and the back,
it must have been very painful.
Sometimes they had to carry him off the bandstand
and we just didn't know that.
You know, we said, "The fuck's wrong with him?" You know?
We didn't have sympathy for Chick until we saw him in the casket.
In the early summer of 1939,
Chick Webb knows he can't hang on much longer.
But he's still concerned about his young singer.
He says to one of his guys,
"Anything happen to me, take care of Ella."
He died a few days later, aged just 30.
Thousands of mourners lined the streets for Webb's funeral in Baltimore.
Traffic was halted across the city.
At the church, Chick's body was viewed by crowds of fans.
Ella sings My Buddy.
NEWSCASTER: Yes siree, from the home of happy feet,
the famous Savoy ballroom, Uptown Harlem, along Lenox Avenue,
it's music by Ella Fitzgerald and Her Famous Orchestra.
When Chick Webb died, it was announced as her band,
and I know she wasn't hiring and firing the musicians,
but she was in charge and she was the leader, she was the star.
# I've paid my intuition for my one ambition... #
Probably deep with in her was an immense amount of ambition and drive,
which came out entirely in her undeniable singing.
# I'll dance with glee... #
SHE SCATS
She wasn't dazzling them with the dress she was wearing
or the dancing, you know, she did it with her voice and her humour
and her humanity.
# Oh boy, I'm in the groove
# Oh boy, I'm...in...the groove. #
There were particular pressures there that any woman performer...
And most particularly for black women -
the demands of glamour, of sexuality.
All of those were coursing through the culture
and Ella Fitzgerald did not fit any of those expectations.
From her late teens, Ella's weight made her miserable.
Reporters called her The Plump Chanteuse.
They laughed when she was trapped in an elevator and wrote,
"220lbs of songstress hauled out by three men."
She was probably ashamed of some of those earlier humiliations
and cruelties.
You know, she was made fun of for being not glamorous,
for being hefty. And coming from, you know, a rough life,
could be turned against a performer by...
..by the press, particularly if you were a woman.
# Crazy rhythm, here's the doorway
# I'll go my way you go your way
# Crazy rhythm, from now on, we are through
# Here is where we have a showdown
# I'm too high-hat, you are too low-down
# Crazy rhythm, it's goodbye to you
# I know that when I highbrow meets a lowbrow walking along Broadway
# Soon a highbrow, he has no brow
# Ain't it a shame? And you're to blame... #
She worked so hard when she was singing that she often sweated.
She's drenched after, like, two songs
because it involves all of who she is.
# Crazy, crazy... #
It's some real stuff, man.
# Crazy... #
Seeing a woman that kind of looks like my grandma
and my auntie in one, that's, like, the coolest thing.
# Give me that rhy...thm... #
And then she is this pioneer as a musician.
# Soon a highbrow, he has no brow. Ain't it a shame? #
She made it seem like anything is possible.
# Got rock, we've got roll
# We want to try satisfy your soul
# We'd like to try do the kind of song
# You know the kind that you like to hear
# Like old songs, new song... #
When you listen to Ella's voice, and her music,
there are no limits.
She can go...
..to places that we can't even...imagine,
which to me is what is part of the mystery of music-making.
SHE SCATS
# Crazy rhythm... #
You know, there she is, this stocky woman who looked like,
you know, she could be a piano teacher
or a librarian or a schoolteacher.
SHE SINGS
That's not what anyone expected of, you know,
the girl who was fronting the Chick Webb band.
Those years when Ella had her own band,
some of the guys resented her as the leader.
A few said she was tough.
Sometimes downright nasty.
After all, a girl's role was to sing, shut up and sit down.
MUSIC: Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy by The Andrews Sisters
In December 1941, America entered World War II.
# He was a famous trumpet man from out Chicago way
# He had a boogie style that no-one else could play... #
Many musicians were drafted.
# But then his number came up and he was gone with the draft
# He's in the army now, a-blowin' reveille
# He's the boogie woogie bugle boy of Company B... #
Within months, Ella Fitzgerald's Famous Orchestra disbanded.
Ballads by a soulful young Sinatra
and Glenn Miller's sentimental swing
reflected the subdued mood of a country at war.
LOUD BANGS
Ella slipped from the hit parade.
Ebony Magazine asked - "What is Ella Fitzgerald's style today?"
MUSIC: Flying Home by Ella Fitzgerald
SHE SCATS
She gave her astonishing answer in 1944,
when she embraced the bop revolution.
SHE SCATS
Fitzgerald's fascination with bebop started in the early '40s,
but now she was ready to plunge in.
SHE SCATS
The heart of the new music is Minton's Playhouse
in Harlem, where Ella sometimes bopped with the boys.
You know, she hung out with Dizzy Gillespie for two tours,
and, you know, two tours later,
she was improvising like a bebop musician.
SHE SCATS
I can sum it up in one word...
..woooow!
SHE SCATS
Ella was doing something that hadn't been done before
and not to that level.
She could solo using her voice
to the same level with the same ease that a trumpeter
or a saxophonist could.
ELLA SCATS
SHE LAUGHS
And I thought, "How is this humanly possible?"
HE HUMS
It's a feat of nature,
it's a FREAK of nature.
Bop blazed new territory for jazz.
The heady cocktail of tearaway tempos
and complex new harmonies blew away the conventions of swing music.
That speaks to her musical adventurousness
and her performer's awareness
that she had to locate herself on a new and exciting landscape.
It had to feel powerful moving from being a girl singer, you know,
to being the woman singer as musician.
SHE SCATS
That had to be fantastic!
HE PLAYS A TUNE
In 1989, 40 years after Ella was hanging out at Minton's,
Kenny Barron would play on her final album.
It was called All That Jazz.
She had great ears, you know?
Cos sometimes it is not just about knowing harmony and theory,
intellectually. But it is also about what you can hear and that's...
You know, great singers have great ears even if
they are not learned, they have great ears.
You know, and they can hear where you're going
and hear where the music should go.
The beboppers use a harmonic vocabulary that was not
known before Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.
SHE SCATS
And things like How High the Moon are very much informed
by the bebop movement.
SHE SCATS
Ella Fitzgerald married a bass player, Ray Brown,
one of the key figures in bebop.
They had fallen in love on tour with Dizzy Gillespie.
She came into this world with that voice, she could just sing,
but although her sound and her abilities were kind of set
in stone from the beginning, she developed hugely as a singer.
# How high the moon?
# Does it touch the stars? #
You know, she kept up with the boys, there's no question.
And most of the time, she outplayed them.
She was improvising bebop like a great bebop musician.
ELLA SCATS OVER HOW HIGH THE MOON
Ella had this genius way of incorporating other
kinds of songs into the main body of her scat singing.
It's not just, you know, scatty wah, dot-dot-dot.
Every note she sings is harmonically sound,
it fits within a certain preordained chord structure,
and when she does these quotes,
they are also from the same chord structure and that's...
..the thing that's so genius, that she could be able to pull that stuff out of the air.
It's that part of singing that's just the most joyous place
to sing from.
You know, skipping through puddles
that could be six-feet-deep and never sinking.
It's like a roller-coaster ride.
# Though the words may be wrong to this song
# We up there like high, high, high, high, high
# High, high, high, high, high... #
It's one thing to sing,
it's another thing to improvise singing or scatting because you
are using a musical language that is so different to straight singing.
ELLA SCATS
During a memorable concert in Berlin in 1960,
Ella explodes with a five-minute scat version of How High the Moon.
SHE SCATS
These are the songs that she quotes - Poinciana, Deep Purple,
Love In Bloom, Ornithology...
SHE SCATS
..The Irish Washerwoman...
..Hawaiian War Chant...
..The Peanut Vendor.
Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater, which is another swinging nursery rhyme.
Quoting from more than 40 songs, nursery rhymes, symphonies,
folk tunes, jigs, bop solos,
show hits - a joyous torrent of invention.
Stormy Weather. Yes, We Have No Bananas,
although in minor, usually played in major.
A little bit of Flight Of The Bumblebee,
another few notes of Deep Purple, Did You Ever See A Dream Walking?
Got To Be This Or That, which was a novelty song from about 1946.
A few notes of the Rhapsody In Blue. Idaho...
ELLA SCATS
# I guess these people wonder what I'm singing... #
After that there's a... A-Tisket A-Tasket.
# Dream walking? Well, I did
# A-tisket a-tasket, I lot my yellow basket
# Guess I'd better quit while I'm ahead
# With high, high, high, high... #
And then she ends the scat with Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.
# They asked me how I knew my true love was true... #
She sings it as "sweat gets in your eyes"
because by that point, she is really perspiring.
# Sweat gets in my eyes
# High, high, high, high, high
# Is the moo-oo-oo-oon. #
Her mind just went from one song to another.
You know, what kind of catalogue do you have in your head to be able to do that?
I can't even begin to think about that, you know.
And, again, you know, in the '70s,
right here on this stage at Ronnie Scott's.
# No gal made has got a shade on sweet Georgia Brown
# Two left feet... #
You know, the way she plays with that ancient song,
Sweet Georgia Brown, it swings so hard.
That's the other thing about her, her sense of swing was just...
It makes you do that swing face, you know, just like...
It's almost... It hurts you, it swings so hard.
# No gal, not a gal
# Got a shade on Georgia Brown
# Two feet, so neat
# Hey, that Georgia Brown
# They sigh and want to cry
# For Georgia Brown
# Listen, while I tell ya
# You know, you know, you know, you know, you know I don't lie... #
You can't help but be reeled in by that level of joy
and excellence. It's one of the reasons it's worth
being on this planet, right?
HE LAUGHS
From 1947, Herman Leonard began documenting jazz,
and especially the rise of bebop.
He photographed Ella
and their friendship produced some of her most lasting images.
Ella adored children.
She had always wanted kids, but she couldn't have her own.
In 1949, Ray and Ella adopted her half-sister's infant son.
They called him Ray Junior.
I grew up in this business seeing people who had huge careers
and they all had one thing in common, they all had very
screwed up private lives because they all led that dual existence.
Ella and her husband struggled to reconcile a non-stop touring
schedule with their marriage.
I saw the collateral damage from women in the business who had
said, you know, I'm going to have a career
and, "I'll be back in a minute," to the kids.
And, "I'll be back in a couple of weeks," to the husband.
And after a while, it's like, "Who is this woman coming into our house?"
By 1953, Ray and Ella were divorced.
But they never stopped playing and touring together.
When I first met her, I think that her marriage had broken up
with Ray and she never seemed to have a strong love life in her life.
It gives you strength when you've got a bloke that will support you.
You always need a bloke to support you.
In 1941, when I started Jazz at the Philharmonic,
I used many of the musicians
from the Chick Webb Orchestra that was then led by Ella Fitzgerald.
To show you how bad my taste was, I used everyone in the orchestra
but the singer.
So now I'd like to correct that and introduce the best
singer there is in jazz today, the great Ella Fitzgerald.
Thank you. APPLAUSE
Thank you.
# Love
# For sale
# Advertising young love
# For sale. #
Ella's life and her music took another new direction in the 1950s.
It brought her international acclaim and enduring fame.
Her new manager, Norman Granz, was determined to take her
out of the little jazz clubs and onto the world's great concert stages.
# A foggy day in London town
# Had me low, had me down
# I viewed the morning... #
Granz matched Ella's voice
with the music of the Great American Song Book.
# The weather is frightening
# The thunder and lightning seem to be having their way
# But as far as I am concerned, it's a lovely day... #
The records are the heart of Granz's new Verve label
that he'd created for Ella.
# A fine romance with no kisses... #
An affluent post-war America can afford the new LPs
and the hi-fis to play them on.
Norman Granz had this idea to have her do these Song Book albums,
which were sophisticated records with orchestras.
It wasn't A-Tisket A-Tasket or When I Get Low I Get High.
It wasn't novelty tunes, it was her as a more mature woman,
as a more mature artist, and now reinventing herself.
So Norman Granz is responsible for that.
# Every time we say goodbye
# I die a little... #
First I thought, I said, "My gosh, what is Norman doing?
"He's taking me away
"from my jazz, and who wants to listen to me singing this?"
# Heaven, I'm in heaven
# And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak... #
But it was funny, I just gained oh, so many fans
all over the world, so it was like a new beginning.
# Let's do it, let's fall in love... #
Norman wants to get Ella out of the jazz clubs
and put her in the world of the American Songbook.
And took her out of A-Tisket A-Tasket world into another world.
# There is nothing for me
# But to love you... #
I like Ella when she sang ballads, I must say, very, very much.
I found them very touching, very moving,
and I thought she knew what she was talking about.
# Just the way you look tonight. #
Norman seized that moment,
using not only the definitive songwriters but Ella Fitzgerald,
who he realised was the definitive interpreter
of that music, and helped to
establish her as that with these great Songbook packages.
# It's very fancy on old Delancey St, you know... #
People did not take these songs seriously before Ella,
they just thought that they were ephemeral.
# When Broadway breezes blow to and fro... #
But for Norman and Ella to come along and preserve these songs
and say, you know, this is what Americans should be proud of,
and this is the way to present them, was really a radical move.
# Sweet pushcarts gently gliding by... #
To think that this girl that sang A-Tisket A-Tasket,
20 years after that, was making the definitive Songbook
of George Gershwin, of Richard Rogers, of Jerome Kern,
and the one who would be taking jazz and the American Songbook
to Berlin, to Helsinki,
to Tokyo. You know, to think that she
would go from that beginning
to be the one who defined the Songbook,
to me is just miraculous.
# We'll go to Coney and eat baloney... #
Ella's Songbooks confirmed her as a superstar.
# In Central Park we'll stroll
# Where our first kiss we stole... #
But the reluctance of music promoters and TV and radio producers
to book black artists remained a frustration for both Granz
and Fitzgerald.
# We both may see it close
# Someday
# The city's clamour can never spoil
# The dreams of a boy and goil... #
I got that line right.
# We'll turn Manhattan into an isle of joy. #
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Fancy nightclubs were also unwilling to offend white customers
by booking black stars.
Norman Granz was trying to get her booked in these high-class,
very, very white,
upper-crusty Hollywood establishments.
And at that point, they were very hesitant to hire African-Americans.
# You're just too marvellous, too marvellous for words... #
Marilyn Monroe loved Ella Fitzgerald,
and said, "Whatever you need, however I can help you,
"I am going to do that."
And she went to the owner of a club, she said, you know,
"If you don't open these doors to everybody,
"I'll make sure nobody shows up."
And she came to the club every night
and half the reason people showed up was because Marilyn Monroe is
sitting in the front row going...
SHE WHISTLES
.."Yo, Ella!"
# And so I'm borrowing a love song from the birds
# To tell you that you're marvellous
# Too marvellous for words. #
But in the South,
Fitzgerald and Granz faced the harsh realities of racism.
One night, there were three Houston detectives
who said that they wanted to be backstage,
and ended up busting into Ella's dressing room.
Somebody was shooting dice, and I got arrested.
And they took me to the jail.
And they took all of us to the jail, right.
The detective pulled a gun on Norman,
said, "I ought to shoot you."
Norman said, "I'll cancel this show, and that's 2,000 people,
"that's your problem, you deal with that."
But he'd been pushing it from the very beginning
when he came in on the afternoon of the concert and personally took down
the "White" and "Colored" signs from the doors.
It was so funny, they wouldn't want us to go in a restaurant,
or something to eat, and yet the moment I walked into jail, they were all asking for my autograph.
By the time they got down to the station,
the press was there.
He just knew that, yes, this really was a set-up,
and ended up suing the police department to get the bail back.
If you messed with Norman Granz, you swallowed the hook whole.
Ella Fitzgerald joined Norman Granz and his musicians
on long international tours under the banner -
Jazz at the Philharmonic.
And now Miss Fitzgerald, Roy Eldridge, Oscar Peterson,
the rest of the show, combine to give you a jazz classic
called It Don't Mean A Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing).
JATP was celebrated for its uproarious jam sessions,
sometimes dismissed by purists as a circus.
# It don't mean a thing if you ain't got that swing
# Doo wah, doo wah, doo wah, doo wah
# It don't mean a thing... #
Ella was an essential presence,
bringing her Songbook ballads and up-tempo scat to the mix.
# It makes no difference if it's sweet or hot... #
We travel, almost, like, every day we're playing
a different country or a different city.
Sometimes we play two cities a day.
# Doo wah, doo wah, doo wah, doo wah
# Doo wah, doo wah, doo wah, doo wah... #
Norman Granz was always obsessed with his jazz concerts
as a way of fighting prejudice.
He called JATP "a race-blind democracy of talent."
As a character, Norman Granz
was a righteous man.
He really saw the evils of segregation,
and was determined to campaign against segregation
within jazz music.
ELLA SCATS
When Granz emerges and says,
"I believe in equality,
"I believe that black musicians and white musicians
"should be equally presented. They should be able to stay in the same hotels,
"they should be able to share the same bandstands,"
it's not only radical in the period, but it certainly earned some of the respect
of a lot of musicians, both black and white.
Norman Granz produced the very first tour I did to Europe.
I was with Dizzy at the time.
Well, one of the things that Norman did is,
midway through the tour,
he gave all the sidemen a $100 bill.
You know, which was a lot of money then.
And he said, "Look, this is just for being on time and doing your job,"
which I thought was great.
The relationship between Norman Granz and Ella Fitzgerald
wasn't always easy.
He was dictating many of her music choices,
but his urge to control could be stifling.
Norman, whenever he was around
either Basie or Ella,
he would tell them, "You're going to open with this,
"you're going to do this, you're going to play this."
He was almost like a Svengali.
Norman could be nasty, and control was his
total direction in life, to control his world.
Frank Sinatra was talking to Ella,
and Norman Granz comes up and starts telling Frank
what he thinks Frank should open with.
And Frank has him thrown out of the theatre.
Norman was a proud guy, and at that point he said,
"OK, Ella Fitzgerald doesn't work with Frank Sinatra any more."
But always, Ella remained Ella.
Norman Granz was a voluminous
collector of Picasso. He also
knew Picasso, hung with Picasso,
and he asked Ella if she would like to go meet Picasso,
and she said, "No. I'm darning socks this afternoon."
# All you've gotta do is swing... #
He did his job.
He had a goal in mind, he was focused on that goal,
and yeah, they reached that goal together.
So it was, you know, a good marriage in that way.
One of the all-time greats of popular music
is a wonderful lady by the name of Ella Fitzgerald.
In-between her tours, Ella Fitzgerald and her son
live in this house on a quiet street in Los Angeles, California.
Hello, Ella!
Hi, Charles!
It was the 1950s.
Beverly Hills was not happy about African-Americans moving in.
Ella was a global star,
but Norman Granz had to buy her house in his name.
I know how busy you are, I'm glad we caught you between tours.
Oh, thank you, yes, you're right when you say between tours.
We just finished a six-week tour in Europe,
and we're about ready to go to South America for six weeks.
With your schedule, it sounds to me as though
you don't get to spend much time at home here in California.
I wish I could. Unfortunately, I don't, Charles,
but I would love to, especially because of my son.
Here's my son, Raymond Brown Jr.
Ray, are you planning a career in music
like your mother, or haven't you decided yet?
Well, I like piano but I think I'd rather be a baseball player.
Musicians that my mother worked with
would let me play their horns or, you know, play drums.
Yeah, there was some really, really nice moments.
Roy Eldridge used to let me play his trumpet.
And we went to Basie's house.
And he had this huge table
with a train set on it, and it was just
spectacular.
"Choo-choo-choo-choo."
Occasionally, my mom would call me out on stage
and we'd dance together on stage.
Loved my mom.
We had, you know, the usual turmoils would go on in family life.
I can remember having those moments when I was very upset with my mother,
and I ran up to my room, and I had my little turntable,
and I would put on The Who's My Generation.
Just crank it as loud as I could, cos...
HE GRUNTS ..that's how I felt.
There was a couple that she had hired,
Chester and Juanita Matlock,
and it was Chester's job
to keep me on the straight and narrow.
At some point,
they told my mother that I needed a little more discipline in my life.
And so they recommended a Catholic military school.
The joy of getting up every morning
and going to Mass.
I got to fight every day
with my fellow classmates.
Marching,
fight time.
I tried out for the orchestra.
They said, "Well, what do you want to play?"
I said, "I want to play trumpet."
So the bandmaster looked at me and he said,
"Well, you can't play trumpet, your lips are too big."
So they gave me a trombone.
Because you have such long periods of being apart,
and who knows how long it will be before you see each other again,
there are times when it's lonely,
and I think music really helps,
it's something that helps settle the heart.
# I could cry salty tears
# Where have I been all these years?
# Little wow, tell me now
# How long has this been going on? #
Now my son is at the age where I would really like to spend a little more time at home.
And I am a woman, and you do get lonesome.
And I don't care how much singing you do, and I don't care how much
audience you have, there are times
when you go home, it's kind of
lonesome without that one person
that you could tell those troubles to, you know?
Someone that you just feel that you can say something to them,
the little intimate things that you wouldn't think of saying
to anyone else. And I've got this big house,
but a house isn't a house without a man.
# A chair is still a chair
# Even when there's no-one sitting there... #
I love my work,
I guess that's one reason why I haven't gotten married again,
because I don't think I would ever want to really just stop
singing altogether,
and it would have to be someone that realised that I love
what I'm doing.
# And no-one there you can kiss
# Goodnight... #
I would have to maybe cut the jobs down
and be a housewife, because I think it can be done.
And if you don't have that experience,
life just doesn't mean anything,
a woman's got to have that kind of experience in her.
And I miss it now
more and more, and as I see my son grow up,
I realise that I want to spend more time at home.
# And a house is not a home
# When the two of us
# Are far apart
# And one of us has a broken heart...#
I just love to sing,
and I don't know, I just feel
that if I couldn't sing, I don't know what I would do.
# And suddenly your face appears... #
As soon as I've had that first week off,
I'm ready to hit the road again,
it's like, "Well, gee, that's part of my family,
"I've got to get out to see how my family's doing."
# It's so nice to have a man moon round the house
# It's so nice to have a man around the house
# I'm not meant to live alone
# Turn this house into a home
# When I climb the stairs
# And turn the key
# Oh, please be there
# Still in love with me
# A house is not a home
# A home is not a house
# A house is not a home and a home is not a house
# Without a man
# Without a man. #
APPLAUSE Thank you.
We'd like to do something for you now,
we haven't heard a girl sing it,
and it's so popular we'd like to try and do it for you.
We hope we remember all the words.
Well, Ella was a road rat.
You know, if she wasn't working, what was she doing?
Was she sitting home alone?
I don't think Ella could ever stay home
and do the cooking for a man.
I think she would prefer to sing for a man.
She was always in a rush to go somewhere.
That's when she was happiest, in front of people,
and they're screaming out there, loud, "We love you, Ella."
I think that meant everything to her.
# Oh, the shark has
# Pearly teeth, dear
# And he shows them pearly white... #
For decades, from the late 1950s,
Ella embarked on an endless series
of concert tours,
performing in dozens of countries around the world,
from Germany to Brazil and Japan.
# Oh, the shark bites with his teeth, dear... #
One concert was in Berlin in 1960,
and it was a year before the Wall went up.
And this was this far at the boundaries of the Soviet Union
as a major American artist had come.
# So there's not, not a trace of red... #
Norman Granz suggested Ella
should try a recent Bobby Darin hit, Mack The Knife.
# Round the corner, tell me, could it be... #
She said, well, she was going to do it but she wasn't sure
she remembered all the lyrics.
# Oh, what's the next chorus
# To this song now?
# This is the one now
# I don't know
# But it was a swingin' tune
# And it's a hit tune
# So we tried to do Mack The Knife
# Ah, Louis Miller
# Oh, somethin' 'bout cash
# Yeah, Miller
# He was spendin' that trash... #
The way she covers up forgetting the words was just so brilliant
and just so inventive and innovative
that it didn't matter.
# Yes, we sung it... #
It worked brilliantly.
# You won't recognise it... #
SHE LAUGHS
# It's a surprise tune
# We told you look out, look out, look out
# Old Macheath's back in town. #
RICHARD VALERIANI: In a supercharged atmosphere,
sparks of racial antagonism flared into violence.
Firemen turned their hoses on the angry crowd.
Police cars were brought in to disperse shouting negroes.
The Civil Rights struggles of the early 1960s
became the background to Ella Fitzgerald's overseas tours.
Travelling, you'd be surprised at things people in other countries
say when they read the papers
about 'em. "My gosh, what is this going on?"
And you feel embarrassed, really, you do,
because you say... Well, gee, what can you say?
What can you say? There's nothing,
and it's really pitiful.
During a radio interview in 1963 with Fred Robbins,
a prominent radio show host and trusted friend,
Ella surprisingly spoke out about prejudice in America.
Maybe I'm stepping out, but I have to say,
because it's in my heart, that it makes you feel so bad to think
that we can't go down to certain parts of the South
and give a concert like we do overseas,
and have everybody just come to hear the music,
enjoy the music, because of,
you know, of the prejudice thing that's going on.
I used to always like to clam up,
because you'd say, "Well, gee,
"show people should stay out of politics,"
but we have travelled so much
and been embarrassed so much.
They can't understand why we don't play in Alabama.
"You don't play there,
"why can't you have a concert? Music is music."
She never made a political statement,
except the one that I heard her say,
it was only three words, and it was the most complete definition
of the ignorance of the world
in the way they treat African-Americans.
She said, "Tony, we're all here."
In three words, she said the whole thing.
The diehards, they are going to just die hard,
they're not going to give in.
And you've got to try to convince the younger ones,
they're the ones that have got to make the future,
and those are the ones we've got to worry about, not those diehards.
I really ran my mouth.
Went really swell. Where does this go?
This goes all over the world. It does?
It's going down... It's going down South. It is?
Well, do you think they are going to break my records when they hear it?
SHE LAUGHS
This is unusual for me,
but I'm so happy that you had me,
because instead of singing, for a change,
I got a chance to get a few things off my chest.
I'm just a human being.
The interview was never broadcast.
Back in the day, when Ella was coming up, it had to be horrible!
I've been through horror,
I've been through the Civil Rights movement,
you know, I was there for that. "Sit here and sit there."
And the marching, and this and that,
and going in, sitting at the counter
in the restaurants, where, first of all,
they didn't want you to come in there.
And you sit there for an hour, an hour and a half,
before somebody would come and say,
"We wish you would leave."
We were travelling in the South many times,
we couldn't stay at any of the major hotels.
Gosh, and this is in the '60s and the '70s.
We couldn't stay in the major hotels,
we had to go to the black side of town and stay in...
They had rooming houses over there.
But artists like Ella, they fought that fight
to break down those doors and break down those barriers
for people like me.
Race was obviously something that
we lived with.
Continue to live with.
# That's why the lady is a tramp
# Doesn't dig dice games with barons and earls
# I won't go to Harlem in ermine and pearls
# She won't dish the dirt with the rest of those girls
# That's why the lady is a tramp
# I love the free, fresh wind in my hair
# Life without care
# I'm broke
# That's oke... #
# Sweet, lovely lady, be good
# Oh, lady, be good to me
# I'm so awfully misunderstood
# Oh, lady, oh, lady, oh, lady, be good to me... #
Ella was the First Lady of Song,
loved, admired, respected by audiences and musicians.
# I'm just a lonesome babe, babe in the wood
# Oh, lady, oh, lady, oh, lady, be good to me... #
SHE SCATS
# I'm so lonesome today
# And so, lady, oh, lady, lady, won't you be so good to me?
# Please, please
# Yeah! #
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
Ella had her own sorrows,
her own troubles, and she had found her own
way to master suffering, unhappiness, grief, shame,
and make it something else.
And one of those things is joy.
She had been singing for 60 years.
"The kids call me Mama Jazz," she said. "That's so cute."
You know, the thing about Ella is, like,
perfection, great artistry...
Thank you!
There is only one thing that you cannot teach,
and that's that certain magic.
You cannot teach magic.
You can't.
And then, when Ella turns a phrase,
that's magic.
# He'll look at me and smile
# And I will understand
# And in a little while
# He'll take my hand
# And though it seems absurd... #
Ella's punishing tour schedule
kept her on the road into her seventh decade.
Paul Smith, the pianist, one time
he told me she had worked something
like 48 weeks out of the 52 weeks. He said he and Stan Levey,
who at the time was the drummer,
after that last concert, they took their tuxedos,
ripped them up and threw them in the garbage can.
And they had had it.
# He'll build a little home
# Just meant for two... #
One more tour in the mid-'80s
seemed to be the end of the road for Ella.
We were on the road with Ella, we had been out for 12 days,
four concerts.
And I'm checking out of the Hilton in Niagara Falls,
the elevator door is opened up,
and Ella is standing there, grasping her chest,
holding on to her road manager,
Pete, saying, "I can't...catch my breath."
And she was having congestive heart failure.
We're coming up to Ella's house right now.
Jim Blackman fell in love with Ella Fitzgerald's music
when he was 15.
For half a century, he was her most loyal fan.
He became her trusted friend
and her final road manager.
She knew I was honest with her.
She knew that she could trust me.
After her operation in '86,
when they thought she wouldn't be able to sing again,
Ella wanted to rehearse.
She was raring to go,
three months later.
# The way you wear your hat
# The way you sip your tea... #
I met her at the airport,
and this was the time when her doctor was saying,
"Ella, don't travel."
# They can't take that away from me... #
I said, "Where are you going?" She said, "I can't wait.
"I'm going to do a date."
She loved the audience, she loved to perform that much
that, thousands of miles away from where she was going,
she couldn't wait to get on that stage
to get that audience and give them the time of their life.
# They can't take that away
# Away
# Can't take that away from me. #
APPLAUSE
Thank you!
When she would do a concert, people would be screaming at the end,
and then she'd come off and say, "Do you think they liked me?"
I mean, the woman was a genius,
who had no idea,
no idea of her own genius.
None.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
People truly loved her.
I was in the Ukraine, doing a concert.
And it was cold!
I mean, it was cold!
So we ran out of the venue,
and we got on the bus,
and the windows were all frosted over.
HE KNOCKS
This man says, "I loved your mother."
And he's standing outside the bus. "I loved your mother.
"I loved your mother, she was so wonderful."
And he had these flowers,
and he wanted to give them to me.
HE SIGHS
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
Thank you, and I'm so proud to be in class
with all of these younger ones coming up.
They ain't going to leave me behind, I'm learning how to rap.
LAUGHTER
Every now and then, I'd say, "Well, I'm thinking about coming back,"
and she said, "Well, I'll believe it when I see it." You know?
So I didn't come back until
I found out that she was seriously ill.
Of course, the dynamics in our lives
had changed, you know, tremendously.
But to see grace like you've never seen before,
in someone who knows that they have a limited lifespan.
Are you saying thank you? CHILD: Thank you...
To see the way that they deal with people every day.
You want one, too?
And to see such kindness.
It was...
..amazing.
Oh, you, aw, you gave it to me!
Turn round, Daddy's taking your picture.
We got to get a picture.
All right. Yeah!
OK, now let me get in here.
You got to get in there, too.
WOMAN: Curtis, open your eyes!
You'd see a little baby, because she loved kids,
and then she'd...
"How you doing, little baby?"
And she'd just start singing to the baby.
# Your daddy, daddy, daddy's rich
# And your ma is good-looking
# So hush, little baby
# Baby, don't you cry. #
I remember the funeral,
and I've got all changed,
had to go to the grocery store.
I'm in the grocery store...
What comes on?
Her music.
# I could cry
# Salty tears
# Where have I been all these years?
# Little wow, tell me now
# How long has this been occurring?
# How long has this been going on? #
APPLAUSE
Everything comes back around.
The way that Ella was reserved,
and the way she was poised and passionate,
you could never tell what her feelings were
until she got to the music,
and then it was always happiness and joy
and everything else that you could have ever hoped for.
# A-tisket, a-tasket
# A brown and yellow basket
# I sent a letter to my mommy
# And on the way I dropped it
# I dropped it, I dropped it
# My little yellow basket
# A little girlie, she picked it up
# And put it in her pocket
# Oh, gee, I wonder where my basket could be
# So do we, so do we, so do we
# So do we
# Oh, why was I so careless
# With that basket of mine?
# That itty-bitty basket
# Was a joy of mine
# A-tisket, a-tasket
# I lost my yellow basket
# Oh, can somebody help me find it
# And make me happy again, again?
# Was it red?
# No, no, no, no
# Was it blue?
# No, no, no, no
# Was it green?
# No, no, no, no
# My little yellow basket. #