HOUSTON SYMPHONY GETS ELLA-MENTAL.
Dubbed the “Queen of Jazz,” singer Ella Fitzgerald exhilarated the music industry with her youthful exuberance, purity of sound, rhythmic phrasing and improvisational ability for more than half a century.
This weekend, the Houston Symphony will do the same for audiences at Jones Hall, sharing her music in “The Ella Fitzgerald Songbook.” Romantic standards like “Come Rain or Come Shine” and “Our Love Is Here to Stay” will be performed by three powerhouse vocalists — Broadway’s Capathia Jenkins, Montego Glover and N’Kenge, an international award-winning singer who returns to Houston after performing in the symphony’s “R&B Mixtape” last February with Grammynominated artist Ryan Shaw.
“We get to, each of us, bring our own color and our own personalities to these timeless songs,” N’Kenge says, “and then we get a chance to blow the roof off the house with these trios where everyone is kind of topping the other one, and we are very playful.”
While studying opera at New York’s Manhattan School of Music, N’Kenge said she collaborated with friends who were jazz musicians in the conservatory’s big bands. She went on to receive her master’s degree at Juilliard, after which she transitioned into Broadway, debuting in “Sondheim on Sondheim” and, more recently, originating the iconic Mary Wells in “Motown: The Musical.” Yet her knowledge and appreciation of the jazz era and of the great American jazz singer, also known as the “First Lady of Song,” reaches further back into her childhood.
“My parents were big fans,” she says. “They would play her music at home, so it was always kind of part of my fabric, being able to connect to that music.”
Bold and brassy
Throughout her exemplary career, Fitzgerald won numerous awards, including over a dozen Grammys, and she worked with the best in the industry, from Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Nat King Cole to Frank Sinatra, Dizzy Gillespie and Benny Goodman. She breathed life into the words of composers with her uncanny ability to emulate the sounds of an instrumentalist. In fact, her distinct, brassy voice was often compared to that of a horn, N’Kenge says.
“A horn player, I would say out of all the instruments that you use, there’s such a brightness to their tone that pierces through a symphony,” she says. “It doesn’t need any type of amplification. It has such a rich sound, and Ella had that richness in her sound.”
Scat master
Each song in the jazz repertoire that Fitzgerald recorded tells its own story, the emotion of which is greatly enhanced by her virtuosic scat singing, or vocal improvisation using nonsense syllables instead of words.
Scatting is never exactly the same and is not meant to be exactly the same. The style is based on one’s mood and how one hears the harmonic structures that he or she is creating a tune within on any given day.
This contributes to its challenging nature, but once the structure is grasped, it becomes enlightening, N’Kenge explains, as it gives an artist more creativity to explore his or her own personality within the lyrics.
“It allows you more freedom than when you’re just singing a melody that’s been written out for you,” she says. “I think of scatting as an extension of the song and a way to tighten the creative portion of it that’s specifically yours. You’re acting as a composer in a way.
“We can try and imitate Ella,” she continues. “It’s the only way her legacy is going to continue, especially when she’s no longer with us. But at the end of the day, there’s only one Ella Fitzgerald.”