Documentary shows Fitzgerald’s rise to jazz royalty
As the great lady said herself, “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing,” and Leslie Woodhead’s documentary “Ella Fitzgerald: Just One of Those Things” has got plenty of swing and a whole lot more.
Its a 90minute jam session, which begins virtual screenings Saturday, June 27 (the Smith Rafael Film Center plans to host a livestream conversation at 4 p.m.), that surveys the legendary jazz singer’s life and career from homeless Harlem teenager to the preeminent bebop vocalist and scat singer and one of the best interpreters of the Great American Songbook. There’s walltowall music, with takefives to hear from celeb admirers such as Tony Bennett, Johnny Mathis, Smokey Robinson, Cleo Laine, Andre Previn, Itzhak Perlman, Jamie Cullum, Laura Mvula and Fitzgerald’s only child, Ray Brown Jr. Coperformers, in archival footage, include Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and more.
That Ella Fitzgerald became Ella Fitzgerald is nothing short of amazing. Early in the Great Depression her mother died from injuries she suffered in a car accident. Fitzgerald ran away from a possibly abusive stepfather to live on the streets of Harlem and spent time in reform school. She was headed for a pretty desperate path if not a short life if she hadn’t aced a talent contest at Harlem’s legendary Apollo Theater at age 16.
She was discovered and groomed by bandleader Chick Webb, and after several hit songs she became a celebrity with her wildly popular jazzification of the nursery rhyme “ATisket, ATasket,” which she cowrote. After Webb died in 1939, Fitzgerald took over the band.
In the late 1940s, Fitzgerald embraced the nascent bebop movement and developed her signature style of scat singing. Her fastpaced improvisational solos were something to behold, a highwire act her son called “skipping through puddles 6 feet deep and never sinking.”
All this, of course, while dealing with an oppressive atmosphere of racism.
“You couldn’t go to Woolworth’s across the street,” recalls Norma Miller, a dancer, choreographer and comedian who was friends with Fitzgerald from the early 1930s until Fitzgerald’s death in 1996. “If you wanted to buy a hat, you couldn’t try it on. The (Black) girls couldn’t work the register.”
Miller, by the way, is a wonderful and energetic presence in the documentary and probably deserves her own; she died last year at age 99.
Even though Fitzgerald got so popular she would sell out concert halls, many Hollywood clubs wouldn’t book Black performers in the mid1950s. One of the biggest, Mocambo, wouldn’t book her until the owner got an earful from one of Fitzgerald’s biggest fans: Marilyn Monroe.
Monroe not only got her booked, but to ensure that things went smoothly (and to hear some great music, presumably), she attended each night of the first week (the incident inspired a 2008 stage musical, “Marilyn and Ella”).
“I owe Marilyn a debt,” Fitzgerald said. “After that, I never had to play a small jazz club again.”
Soon after that, she was on the road to becoming a national treasure.
Woodhead does a nice job of efficiently moving through Fitzgerald’s life, despite an apparent lack of much film from the early years. There are plenty of great photographs, though, including those by noted photographer Herman Leonard, who was a key figure in honing Fitzgerald’s image during her rise in popularity.
The best thing about “Ella Fitzgerald: Just One of Those Things,” other than the music, is the way it evokes an era and reminds us that its subject was one of the great voices of the 20th century.
That Ella Fitzgerald became Ella Fitzgerald is nothing short of amazing. She was headed for a pretty desperate path if she hadn’t aced a talent contest at Harlem’s legendary Apollo Theater at age 16.