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The Genius of Ella Fitzgerald
She remade the American songbook in her image, uprooting the very meaning of musical performance.
The labor historian Archie Green, a childhood friend of Granz’s, recalled their shared youthful enjoyment of “New Deal culture”: WPA theater, Hall Johnson’s gospel choir, reading The Nation and The Atlantic Monthly at the public library. The typical venues for Black jazz musicians, of course, posed their own set of risks: During a JATP stop in Houston not long after Granz began managing her, police fearful of a bustling desegregated show arrested Fitzgerald and several of her bandmates on trumped-up charges of gambling. The more salient challenge lies in overcoming the temptation to simply lay out the archive—an inclination prevalent in jazz biography, given the volume of artists for whom there is such a dearth of knowledge—in favor of a biographical interpretation that in arranging and examining the archive also reveals, radiantly, some new vision of the world that produced it.
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