Alexander wrote Fitzgerald’s big band hit

Van Alexander, a musical jack- of- all- trades who cowrote Ella Fitzgerald’s biggest hit in the 1930s, led a swing band, composed arrangements for other bandleaders and later became a composer and music director in Hollywood, died July 19 at a Los Angeles hospital. He was 100.

He had heart and kidney ailments, said his daughter Joyce Harris.

Alexander was a self-taught musician who grew up in New York during the early years of jazz and the swing era. He went on to be a busy behind-thescenes figure in music studios, working with such stars as Dean Martin, Doris Day, Mickey Rooney and Lena Horne.

“Van was the consummate professional,” film music historian Jon Burlingame said Saturday in an interview. “He was a great arranger, and he knew how to write for a vocalist with a band.”

As a teenager, Alexander played piano and led a band under his original name, Al Feldman.

His father ran a drugstore in Harlem, and Alexander became a fixture at nearby dance halls, particularly the Savoy Ballroom, where the featured band was led by drummer ChickWebb.

He told Webb that he had some musical arrangements to show him. When Webb said he was interested, Alexander “went home with fear and trepidation” because he hadn’t yet written the arrangements, he recalled in a 2012 interview with jazz writer MarcMyers.

“Over the next four or five days,” he said, “I knocked out two charts.”

Webb liked the music, “paid me $ 10 for each one, and I went home on Cloud 90.”

At age 20, Alexander became a regular arranger for Webb, whose hard-swinging group bested Benny Goodman’s in a now- famous Savoy Ballroom battle of the bands in 1938. Webb’s singer was a young Ella Fitzgerald, who kept asking Alexander to write a song for her.

She suggested a variation on a nursery rhyme, “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” and she and Alexander, who was still known as Al Feldman, took joint credit as the song’s composers. He wrote the playful call- andresponse lyrics in which the band shouts out questions to Fitzgerald about her lost yellowbasket: “Wasitgreen?” No,no,no,no. “Wasitred?” No,no,no,no. “Wasitblue?” No,no,no,no.Justalittle yellowbasket.

“A-Tisket, A-Tasket” spent more than two months as the country’s No. 1 song in 1938.

“No one knew what we had at the time,” Alexander said in the 2012 interview withMyers for his “JazzWax” website. “It was just another novelty song, and picking a hit is next to impossible. It just happens.”