Ella Fitzgerald’s favourite singers: “Making such beautiful headway”
“Her technical singing is fucking insane,” Thom Yorke once said, describing the appeal of a certain Ella Fitzgerald. “She’s belting the crap out of it. She’s so loud, and she doesn’t miss one note”.
It’s impossible to say where music would be without the influence of Black artists, and yet, it’s the one thing that’s often the most overlooked, especially when it comes to the pioneers of the 1950s. Names like Fitzgerald are undeniably massive in music, but they’re often seen as separate entities in the broader debates around the most innovative names of the era, like somehow jazz wasn’t the one thing that changed the entire game.
For some, everything music ever came was and is all down to jazz, and how it didn’t just set new standards or change the approach to musical structure, but also centred on the power of feeling. For Nina Simone, it was central to all musical excellence, a force worthy of as much respect as classical music, and something that made her feel close to divinity. Billie Holiday shared the same view, once saying jazz was all about music that makes you feel good, and it’s as simple as that.
According to Fitzgerald, it also held this inexplicable quality that was quite literally impossible to describe, more so because it transcended every other art form due to its raw emotionality. Several names come to mind when celebrating the jazz greats, many of whom people like Simone celebrated her entire career, like John Coltrane and Miles Davis.
However, the two Fitzgerald once named among her favourites were singers Nancy Wilson and Carmen McRae. She also highlighted the power of soul legend Dionne Warwick, and how it’s difficult to pinpoint an ultimate favourite because there were so many gorgeous singers who influenced her own music. “I don’t think there’s only one thing of anything,” she once explained.
Continuing, “There wouldn’t be room for anybody else. When you look around, you see girls like Dionne Warwick, who is just making such a beautiful headway. And Nancy [Wilson] and Carmen [McRae]… There’s just so many good singers around. Some just never get the chance. So Carmen is to me one of the girls, you might say, has still yet to get to that point. There’s a girl out of Chicago that I love so much, but she’s one of those homebodies that just does not like to come out on the road. A girl called Lurlean Hunter. Then there’s Peggy [Lee] who can do no wrong.”
Many of these names are actually what some would say criminally underrated, particularly names like Hunter, who established so much new ground for singing technique (especially in America) that you can still hear her influence in various corners today. Though the same could be said for many female voices of that era, the ones who somehow fell by the sidelines, even though they still exist in the sounds of countless contemporary musicians.
But the same could also be said for Fitzgerald, and how, despite her legacy remaining strong today, she held a strong emotional core that bleeds into a lot of music you still hear, with the kind of passion only she could deliver, living up to the principle of using music as a tool to conjure energy you can’t put into words. And, as she proved, it’s not that female singers were sparse; it’s that so many of them were innovating the space that finding the “best” or the “first” became nearly impossible.
