"Born just a few years after Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, known as the 'First Lady of Song,' turned scat singing into high art and enjoyed an extended career through the swing and later bebop years, and on into the 1970s and mid-1980s. She recorded over 200 albums, including several with trumpeter and fellow virtuoso of scat, Louis Armstrong, as well as several album-length programs of music by some of America's greatest composers, including Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, George and Ira Gershwin, Irvin Berlin, and Rogers and Hart."
Happy birthday, Ella!
(Excerpted from Freedom of Expression: Interviews With Women in Jazz by Chris Becker.)
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