From: adolphso@mizar.usc.edu (adolphson)
Newsgroups: soc.motss
Subject: Ella (was Re: Dietrich, Madonna, etc.)
Date: 10 Oct 1992 13:35:56 -0700
Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
NNTP-Posting-Host: mizar.usc.edu

In article <1992Oct10.172354.29487@spdcc.com> 
dyer@spdcc.com (Steve Dyer) writes:
> In article <1992Oct10.133226.19664@macc.wisc.edu> 
> anderson@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson) writes:

[...]
> >Well, Ella I would call an icon of jazz singers [...]
> >There are lots of jazz singers, but none with the scope of Ella.
> >In the world of jazz, she just *is*, and it's a mighty big thing 
> >that she is.
>
> Well, I'd agree that she's a big name not only in jazz but in popular
> music, and I enjoy her "Songbook" albums and her singing style,
> which nonetheless means reducing all nuance to nonsense and pain to
> pleasantries.  (Eeek! ducking...)  

No need to duck from me on that one.  It's why I really
don't like her Cole Porter Songbook.  The songs are all
very pleasantly done, but there's no *ooompf*.  Her Harold
Arlen is all wrong, too.  The successful Arlen singers are
the ones who've got that extra something -- be that lived 
experience, pain, personality -- people like Judy Garland 
and Lee Wiley and the young Barbra Streisand.  Ella's
Harold Arlen just sits there.  It's *beautiful*, but not
at all involving, and I don't know of another songwriter
whose songs can be more delightful, painful, involving.
Compare Ella's The Man That Got Away or Over the Rainbow 
with Judy's.  Compare Ella's Stormy Weather with Ethel
Waters' or Judy's or Ivie Anderson's.  Compare Ella's
Let's Take a Walk Around the Block with Tammy Grimes',
or her One for My Baby with Yvonne de Carlo's.  Ella sings
all of those songs beautifully -- there is almost no one
with that gorgeous a tone, that incredible an instrument --
but there's no *person* there.

Of course Ella is a big name in jazz, but she pales in
significance next to Billie Holiday.  Hell, all jazz singers
with the exception of Louis Armstrong pale in significance
next to Billie Holiday.

> Scat singing might be another matter--
> the words aren't important.  But there's something about Ella which
> strikes me as too comfortable (in every way: her art, her life) which
> disqualifies her in my mind as in icon.  

As you wrote (and I accidentally deleted), I, too, tend to
think of icons in terms of hagiography and martyrology.  But
even if that's overdoing it, I think there has to be *something*
that grabs the attention, that focusses the imagination of
the public.  Ella just doesn't have it.  Have you ever seen
any of the episodes of the short-lived (6 episodes?) Ella 
Fitzgerald TV show from the mid 1960s? It was ghastly.  She 
puttered around her house and backyard lipsynching to pre-recorded
tapes.  I still remember her singing People while on her backyard
swing.  <Shudder>

> >The power of an icon is less what *it* is than what *we* are
> >in terms of that icon.  In ways I haven't yet articulated in
> >any detail (and probably won't and maybe can't), one reason
> >this discussion has become so long is that it takes *time*,
> >really a lot of it, to make the distinction between icon and
> >star palpable in one's *own* life-experience.
>
> Bingo.  From the evidence here, I think it involves crossing the age
> of 26 or thereabouts, but there may be something cognitive involved,
> too. :-)

I'm still stuck on the idea that if it's not talked about
by Mary Hart or the MTV video jockeys, then it's not part
of our culture.  I don't understand that.  I think of our
culture as one that is at least 3000 years old and which 
was created and is sustained by accretion.  Each new group
of 18-24 year olds does *not* create the world from scratch.

Arne