Overall, I liked learning about Ella’s life so I will give this 4 stars. The writing may be more of a 3 star book for me. This may be because it was written by a white man in the 90s. He is certainly knowledgeable about jazz and the major players. I would have liked to see more interest in compassion toward Ella as a person. Her adopted son got no more than 1 page of coverage in the first half of the book…And Ella was repeatedly referred to as having “no family to speak of,” which was clearly not true,” and it was emphasized how lonely she must have been. A 2019 documentary of Ella expressed far more of a connection with her son than this book implied (which I am inclined to believe since her son was interviewed and featured in the doc) and that her social life was more fruitful, as well.

I prefer more information about the artist's personal life and less about her professional performances in many venues. Ella maintained a distance between herself and her public, and I respect that. Nevertheless, I had hoped to learn more about her, her relationships including the ones with her husbands, lovers, adopted son and granddaughter.

I wish I had enough time to finish this before I had to return it to the library. But what i read was well-researched and set me on the path to discover a lot more of her influences and those she inspired. Excellent read.

Stuart Nicholson has done an excellent job of revealing Ella Fitzgerald's life. His research was extensive and his insight on how music changed in her lifetime is very compelling. The only drawback, in my opinion, is the denseness of his writing. Though, it is just a little over 300 pgs., it is not a quick read.

I love Ella's music... But even my love of Ella can't stop me from thinking that this is one of the worst biographies I have ever read... It is simply a Wikipedia entry of Ella's albums and concerts.. I think the writer would have been better off writing a book on history of jazz based on facts as there is nothing humane about Ella in this work. I'm also puzzled why he chose Ella as he seems to dislike 90% of what Ella has done despite acknowledging the fact that she has an amazing musical talent.

This took a long time to read because, once Ella makes it, the story is over. The book becomes a record on repeat: Concert tour, concert tour, concert tour, album release, moderate shake-up; repeat. Bless her, Ella managed to stay away from controversy, which makes for a great life as a public figure, but makes for pretty dull reading.

Hearing Ella Fitzgerald finesse the Gershwin songbook is one of my earliest, strongest childhood memories. The magic of her singing spoiled me for good. Nicholson's well-researched book gave me such an appreciation for the incredible poverty, racism, and sexism she overcame to share her singular talent with the world. He acknowledges her eagerness to please caused her to often choose inferior material to sing, but he clearly revered her superlative diction, clarity, and range. He acknowledges that many find Billie Holliday superior as an artist, and while I adore Lady Day's work as well, I feel that Ella deserves all the accolades she lived to receive. Her drug of choice was food, and she paid for that with diabetes and limb loss, but she avoided the tragic loss of her skills far longer than Holliday. Ella Fitzgerald lived to sing, and how grateful I am that she recorded for the ages.

lots of information and a great discography indexed by years

One of the most levelheaded and hype-free biographies I've written. Great myth-busting and music-dissecting too.

Extremely well researched & a very detailed discography / summary of recording sessions. Some of the writing was stiff, but that is forgivable considering the thoroughness of the author’s work.

slower read but full of interesting information

Since reading Malka Marom’s Joni: In Her Own Words, I have developed a huge appetite for interviews with and biographical writing on my favorite music artists. I’ve been an ardent Ella Fitzgerald fan since high school but in the past two years have listened to her music with fresh ears and an obsessive fervor not seen since I first discovered Lucinda Williams. Wanting to fan the flame and get a better grasp on a discography that spans six decades, I picked up this book, as it was the most cited on her Wikipedia page. It does some good accounting of her studio output, especially her Decca years, and gives decent insight on the evolution of her style. But to glint Ella Fitzgerald as a barrier-breaking musical genius who helped define three eras of vocal jazz and popular song based on Stuart Nicholson’s account requires a lot of reading between the lines. Despite the usefulness of some of his original research, the book is plagued by inept and cliched writing and frequent and overt condesension toward its subject.

Nicholson announces from the beginning that the book was written without her cooperation (it was published three years before her death), relying instead on the written record and interviews with people who knew and worked with her. While I’m sure not having Fitzgerald’s input was a limitation, it doesn’t excuse the tiny role her voice plays in Nicholson’s story of her life. If we follow only his account, it seems that Ella Fitzgerald was not responsible for her own career and stardom. He would have it that she was an extraordinary musician with little vision for what her sound should be, whose output was defined largely by male chaperones—Chick Webb, Decca’s Moe Gale and Milt Gabler, and eventually Norman Granz. This version of events is not only contradicted by the obvious fact that it was her voice and her abilities as a live performer that sold records and packed concert venues around the globe. As Nicholson details, she broke onto the scene thanks to her own precocious musical abilities, blossomed into a virtuoso stylist with the Chick Webb Orchestra, engineered her first hit with “Tisket-A-Tasket,” lobbied for the record company to give her better material, pursued new and exciting sounds her entire career, embracing bop and changing the game for women in jazz for decades to come, and eventually emerged as a preeminent interpreter of the Great American Songbook.

Yet Nicholson does not take these facts as the starting point for the story of an ambitious and pioneering music artist. He instead consistently follows other voices who characterize her as a shy and childlike, whose naivety is reflected in her “girlish” tone, questionable song choices and ebullient performing style. Following some other hack jazz critics, Nicholson wants you to believe that Ella Fitzgerald did not “put herself in her music,” could rarely emote, and didn’t understand the lyrics of a Cole Porter song. At best, he grants her musical intelligence and a cool perfection that belies her inability to grasp the meaning of a song. At worst, he dips into demeaning rhetoric, disparaging her intellect and physical appearance, and discounting her experiences as an artist and a woman. The role of sexism, racial prejudice and segregation in limiting her early career is given scarce attention. Her romances, including her six-year marriage to bassist Ray Brown, are dismissed as affairs and mishaps in the life of a plain and lonely woman. The last two decades of her career are nearly completely written off as a mere document of vocal decline with little artistic value. And throughout he dedicates a bizarre amount of energy to transcribing insults and rude and misguided comments from her fellow musicians.

One of his most galling rhetorical moves comes in Chapter 11, which he opens with an epigraph quotation from Sylvia Syms, a white woman, proclaiming, “I don’t think anyone would accuse Ella of having an intellectual relationship with the lyrics to her song.” This is how he chooses to introduce the years 1955-7 in her career, the start of her iconic songbook era, and in fact seems to be one of the theses of his book, something he returns to again and again, even as he consistently provides evidence that contradicts it (accounts of audiences rapt and near tears as she sings a ballad, stirring live renditions of “Body and Soul” and “I Loves You, Porgy” ). In the last chapter, immediately following a grotesque and sexist summation of her artistry in relation to other “sexier” women singers, Nicholson quotes Betty Carter as saying, "Ella sings a ballad pretty much how the composer wants a ballad sung, because she's going to sing it straight...the way she approaches the melody is the important thing...the phrasing, the attack of the words, the way she sounded when she sang." Bafflingly, he uses this, again, as evidence that she did not make a song her own. Carter is of course describing the ingenious and subtle ways in which she did.

Incidentally, Nicholson has also written a biography of Billie Holiday and in 2021 penned an article for Jazz Times that posthumously diagnoses her as a criminal psychopath (I’m not joking). His goal in that article as in this book, conscious or otherwise, is to deny these women the authority to speak for themselves. Ella Fitzgerald did in fact give accounts of her life and artistry in interviews and in song throughout the course of her seven-decade career. She, like Holiday, understood her songs as a mode of personal expression and a means of communicating with audiences For someone interested in learning more about that, I would direct them instead to Judith Tick’s Becoming Ella Fitzgerald, which at least envisions her as a conscious agent, placing the singer much more firmly at the center of her own narrative, drawing readily from sources that no doubt existed when Nicholson was writing his biography but which he almost completely overlooks.