Over the 50-plus years of her long career, Ella sang everything, from novelty songs (her first great success was with “A-Tisket, A-Tasket’’), to jazz, swing, blues, and bebop. But the heart of her work - both in terms of how much she recorded and how definitive her performances were - was the repertoire known as the Great American Songbook: ballads and show tunes by Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Duke Ellington, Jerome Kern, Johnny Mercer, and Harold Arlen.
Many of the great women singers recorded this material, and each of them brought something different (and wonderful) to it. When you listen to Billie Holiday sing a love song, you’re listening to a woman who’s been hurt over and over again. She’s not just singing about a case of heartbreak; she’s singing about heartbreak as a perpetual state of being. With Dinah Washington, you hear a kind of indomitable savvy. Nobody breaks her heart and gets away with it. If you try to kick her, she’ll just kick you right back, step over you, and move on.
But with Ella, what you hear is intelligent, faithful, romantic love. You hear monogamy. She sounds like she met a man, fell in love with him, and stayed with him. When she sings, “Love is as solid as the rock of Gibraltar,’’ you believe her. Her voice is full of tenderness, affection, and humor. You believe, listening to Ella, that love makes sense.
It didn’t always in her private life. Singing is not autobiography. Ella had two short and unhappy marriages, one of them to a drug dealer, and she was also romantically involved with a young Norwegian swindler who wound up in prison. In company she generally felt awkward and shy. “I think I do better when I sing,’’ she said.
