Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song - REVIEW

by Judith Tick

A landmark biography that reclaims Ella Fitzgerald as a major American artist and modernist innovator.

Ella Fitzgerald (1917–1996) possessed one of the twentieth century’s most astonishing voices. In this first major biography since Fitzgerald’s death, historian Judith Tick offers a sublime portrait of this ambitious risk-taker whose exceptional musical spontaneity made her a transformational artist.

Becoming Ella Fitzgerald clears up long-enduring mysteries. Archival research and in-depth family interviews shed new light on the singer’s difficult childhood in Yonkers, New York, the tragic death of her mother, and the year she spent in a girls’ reformatory school-where she sang in its renowned choir and dreamed of being a dancer. Rarely seen profiles from the Black press offer precious glimpses of Fitzgerald’s tense experiences of racial discrimination and her struggles with constricting models of Black and white femininity at midcentury.

Tick’s compelling narrative depicts Fitzgerald’s complicated career in fresh and original detail, upending the traditional view that segregates vocal jazz from the genre’s mainstream. As she navigated the shifting tides between jazz and pop, she used her originality to pioneer modernist vocal jazz. Interpreting long-lost setlists, reviews from both white and Black newspapers, and newly released footage and recordings, the book explores how Ella’s transcendence as an improvisor produced onstage performances every bit as significant as her historic recorded oeuvre.

From the singer’s first performance at the Apollo Theatre’s famous “Amateur Night” to the Savoy Ballroom, where Fitzgerald broke through with Chick Webb’s big band in the 1930s, Tick evokes the jazz world in riveting detail. She describes how Ella helped shape the bebop movement in the 1940s, as she joined Dizzy Gillespie and her then-husband, Ray Brown, in the world-touring Jazz at the Philharmonic, one of the first moments of high-culture acceptance for the disreputable art form.

Breaking ground as a female bandleader, Fitzgerald refuted expectations of musical Blackness, deftly balancing artistic ambition and market expectations. Her legendary exploration of the Great American Songbook in the 1950s fused a Black vocal aesthetic and jazz improvisation to revolutionize the popular repertoire. This hybridity often confounded critics, yet throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Ella reached audiences around the world, electrifying concert halls, and sold millions of records.

A masterful biography, Becoming Ella Fitzgerald describes a powerful woman who set a standard for American excellence nearly unmatched in the twentieth century.

W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN-13 978-0393241051

Images in the River: The Life and Work of Waring Cuney - REVIEW

by Cynthia Davis and Verner D. Mitchell

The poet William Waring Cuney (1906–1976) hails from an illustrious Afro-Texan family whose members include the charismatic politician Norris Wright Cuney (1846–1898) and his daughter, Maud Cuney Hare (1874–1936), the concert pianist and writer. Waring Cuney’s maternal line, after whom he was named, was equally eminent.

Cuney was born and raised in Washington, DC, just a few blocks from Howard University where three generations of his family studied. Despite his privileged upbringing among the city’s Black elite, Cuney embraced his family’s passionate commitment to racial uplift and civil rights; in exploring the relationship between African Americans and their environment, he was thus able to transmute into two books of poetry a broad cross section of African American life; his poems and songs explore the lives of jazz musicians, athletes, domestic and railway workers, women and children, blues singers, prisoners, sharecroppers, and soldiers. In addition, Cuney published in all the major Harlem Renaissance journals and anthologies alongside the luminaries of the period, many of whom were good friends.

Through 100 of his best poems, many never before collected or published, and a detailed biographical monograph, Images in the River: The Life and Work of Waring Cuney introduces readers to a newly recovered Harlem Renaissance poet, and to the history of a remarkable American family.

Texas Tech University Press
ISBN-13 978-1682831977

Jazz with a Beat: Small Group Swing, 1940-1960 - REVIEW

by Tad Richards

Jazz with a Beat is the first book on the often overlooked but vitally important genre of small group swing jazz. Coming into being in the early 1940s, small group swing answered the need in the Black community for a form of jazz that was more accessible (and more danceable) than the new bebop. An adaptation of the big band Black swing (Erskine Hawkins, Jimmie Lunceford, Chick Webb) of the 1930s to small combos, and with a more vigorous beat for the new generation, this music developed and was beloved through the 1940s, continued to be enjoyed through the rock and roll years of the 1950s, and was a major influence on the soul jazz of the 1960s. Among the many hit artists portrayed in these pages are Illinois Jacquet, Louis Jordan, Big Jay McNeely, Joe Liggins, Nat "King" Cole, Red Prysock, Ruth Brown, Nellie Lutcher, Camille Howard, T-Bone Walker, and Ray Charles. Dismissed as "rhythm and blues," this music has been ignored by jazz historians. Jazz with a Beat honors this music as a legitimate genre of jazz and is a stirring evocation of an era. It should be of interest to lovers of jazz and Americana.

Tad Richards is a prolific visual artist, poet, novelist, and nonfiction writer who has been active for over four decades. He is the author (with Melvin B. Shestack) of The New Country Music Encyclopedia, among many books. He lives in Kingston, New York.

Excelsior Editions/State University of New York Press
ISBN-13 978-1438496016

Ghosts of Segregation: American Racism, Hidden in Plain Sight - REVIEW

by Richard Frishman and B. Brian Foster

From award-winning photojournalist Richard Frishman comes a collection of photographs documenting America’s history of segregation, slavery, and institutional racism hidden in plain sight, accompanied by hard-hitting personal essays from University of Virginia professor of sociology and Black culture B. Brian Foster and with a foreword by National Book Award winner Imani Perry.

Beginning in 2018, Richard Frishman embarked on a 35,000-mile journey, crossing the United States several times, traveling from his home state of Washington to Maine, from Mississippi to Michigan, and everywhere in between. Frishman was driven by a deep concern for capturing traces of the nation’s history of segregation, slavery, and institutional racism embedded in everyday American architecture. Frishman spent the next five years capturing photographs of structures like the New Orleans Slave Exchange, old “colored entrances” at movie theaters in Seattle and Texas, formerly segregated beaches in Los Angeles, and the former site of New York City’s slave market.

As Frishman was traveling the country, his collaborator, noted sociologist Dr. B. Brian Foster, was writing about economic development, Black community life, and the blues in his home state of Mississippi. Foster adds to this collection seven essays of stirring prose and intimate storytelling. Whether reflecting on his relationship to his grandmother and her archive of family photos or chronicling his experiences working as a professor at the University of Mississippi and the University of Virginia, Foster adds layers of emotional resonance and sharp insight to the photographic collection with his essays, speaking to the shared memories, living histories, rippling beauty, and ongoing struggles of Black life in the United States.

Within this immersive collection, readers will witness and learn of histories startling, stirring, and thought-provoking: Histories of white supremacist violence and systemic racism. Histories of segregated bathrooms, beaches, churches, dining areas, doors, hospitals, hotels, waiting rooms, and water. Histories of Black aliveness and aspiration. Histories of Black migration, Black entrepreneurship, Black protest and organizing, Black singing and dancing, and Black placemaking.

This remarkable book brings home a powerful truth: these ghosts of segregation haunt us because they are very much alive. It also reveals how our surroundings bear witness to history, reminding us where we have been, where we are now, and crucially asking, Where do we go from here?

Celadon Books
ISBN-13 978-1250831682