Music is a mysterious and elusive thing, and its beauty is easily lost in the shuffle of profit, power, and politics shaping every mode of cultural expression, but especially what Fitzgerald’s generation called “show business.” In that realm, the easiest way to survive is by pandering to the prejudices of the audience. It’s therefore not surprising that she was met with insults and slights. Yet rather than blame these setbacks on abstractions like racism, sexism, lookism, classism, and ageism, Tick traces the ingenious ways in which the singer and Norman Granz, her lifelong manager, thrived by challenging those prejudices.
Tick dismisses the myth that Granz was a Svengali hypnotizing a shy, awkward Fitzgerald into performing. Instead, she stresses Ella’s initiative every step of the way. For example, it was his idea to make a series of albums containing the best, most enduring songs written for Broadway and musical theater during the twentieth century. But it was her decision not to embroider them with melodic variations in the manner of older jazz masters like Louis Armstrong, or to supplant them with intense rhythmic scatting in the manner of young bebop virtuosos like Dizzy Gillespie. She was already mistress of both, but as Tick approvingly explains, she opted for a “curatorial” approach that “by muting her own personality…would clear space for a collective presentation of the songwriter’s oeuvre.”
Fitzgerald also muted herself when it came to joining the struggle for racial equality that loomed so large during her lifetime. She could have marched and sung protest songs, and was often asked to do so. But she preferred to devote her time, wealth, and talent to ground-level causes within the black communities of New York and, later, Los Angeles (where she moved in 1970). Tick quotes a 1977 article in the New York Amsterdam News praising her “profound humility” and noting that while “the world considers her ‘great’ and a ‘star,’ she never gloats on that fact. Instead, she expends her energy doing whatever she can to help others.”
This is one of many quotes from the black press of the time, including national newspapers such as the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender, that have recently been digitized. Tick stresses that this “rich fount of new information” enabled her to upgrade the literature on Fitzgerald’s life from SD (standard definition) to HD (high definition). Even the most ardent fans will appreciate Tick’s meticulous re-creation of half-forgotten people and places, her inclusion of probing interviews in which Ella and other African Americans speak more candidly than elsewhere, and (not least) her reliance on black critics to render musical judgments more discerning than those issued by most of their white counterparts.