Ella Fitzgerald , born April 25, 1917> at Newport News and died June 15, 1996 in Beverly Hills, is a famous American jazz singer.
She is one of the most important and famous singers of vocal jazz in jazz history, with a range of three octaves, remarkable for the purity of her voice and her ability to improvise, especially in scat. First nicknamed "The First Lady of Swing">, it inherits the title of Jazz Royalty "The First Lady of Song" after the apogee of the swing (literally "The First Lady of the song", but translates more willingly by " The Great Lady of Jazz "), with 70 albums sold to 40 million copies in nearly 60 years of career, and 14 Grammy Awards, including the Grammy of the crowning of a career.
She is considered, along with Sarah Vaughan, Nina Simone and Billie Holiday, as one of the four greatest jazz singers in history.
She is famous among others for her improvisations, with in particular Mack the Knife (excerpt from The Threepenny Opera) in Berlin in 1960, a piece in which she had a memory lapse and continued without hesitation alternating scat and improvised words. This version of Mack the Knife is certainly one of Ella Fitzgerald's best-known hits, along with Mr. Paganini and How High the Moon. Another of her famous improvisations took place during a concert of Antibes-Juan-les-Pins on the Côte d'Azur in the summer of 1964, while she was performing in the Pinède Gould on the occasion from the Jazz à Juan festival, with his legendary swing-hot jazz rendition of It Do not Mean a Thing with Duke Ellington and his big band, or his tribute to the cicadas with The Cricket Song > ...
