For Women In Jazz Month 2022, I want to celebrate Ella Fitzgerald.
In a 2017 essay, “The Casual Excellence of Ella Fitzgerald,” Prof. Emily J. Lordi wrote:
One hundred and one years after her birth and two decades after her death, Ella Fitzgerald’s voice still sounds like your best day, your most clever retort, your most glamorous party. By age twenty she had turned that voice into an instrument of outstanding facility and inventiveness; brassy, husky, and pearly by turns, there was nowhere it couldn’t go, nothing it couldn’t do. In that way, her sound itself defied the restrictions of the Jim Crow era into which she was born, and the personal and social blocks that dogged her thereafter. In the end, the “First Lady of Jazz” seems to have outwitted them all — stylishly and profoundly expanding the parameters of Black women’s art.
Ella was the “First Lady of Jazz” but there was nothing ladylike when she told her man: “If you don’t like my peaches, why do you shake my tree? Stay out of my orchard and let my peach tree be.”
