The life of Ella Fitzgerald presents three challenges for biographers. First, it has been without great scandal or drama; second, it provides no subtext for her music (as does Billie Holiday's, for example); third, it has been obscured by fifty years of tightly controlled publicity. To complicate matters further, Ella herself stays as far from biographers as Bessie Smith stayed from opera. And yet, undaunted, Englishman Stuart Nicholson has spent five years probing beyond the publicity screens to see what can be learned about America's most durable jazz singer.

The gumshoe work behind this book is impressive. Nicholson interviewed more people by far than Ella's previous biographers, including surviving acquaintances from Ella's childhood, survivors of the Chick Webb orchestra, executives at Decca, executives at Verve (including Norman Granz, who has cooperated with no previous biographer), Ella's accompanists, and a host of jazz artists, critics and discographers. Furthermore, he employed an array of researchers to excavate courthouse records for birth certificates, death certificates, marriage licenses, and census information. Unlike other biographies of Ella, this book is built almost exclusively on primary sources rather than yellowed press releases from Down Beat or Melody Maker.

Some findings are more interesting than significant. Nicholson discovers, for example, that Ella was born in 1917 rather than 1918, so that her much heralded 75^th birthday in 1993 was in fact her 76^th, and her recently discovered 40^th birthday concert is in reality her 41^st. (The confusion arose when she mistook [or lied] about her age on her marriage license to Ray Brown.) He also demonstrates that Ella did in fact marry con-man Ben Kornegay in 1941 and then had the marriage quickly annulled, even though in later years she denied it, and press releases at the time are contradictory.

Such detail gives the book a gossipy sort of interest, but other matters are more enduringly significant. For example, Nicholson writes better and more thoroughly than anyone before him about Ella's effect on Chick Webb's orchestra and career. For decades it has been said that Webb and his wife adopted Ella and treated her as a daughter. Nicholson demonstrates otherwise. Webb and Ella got along well, but theirs was a business relationship. Webb saw that Ella could give his orchestra a national following, but that in doing so she would change its original identity. In the end, he opted for recognition, but the choice was not easy.

By far the most significant dimension of this book, however, is its assessment of Ella's work, an assessment which departs notably from the traditional view. The Decca years, Nicholson argues, are not the wasteland of commercial novelties we have been led to believe, and the Verve years do not constitute a series of crowning triumphs. For example, Nicholson points to Ella's due album with Ellis Larkins, Ella Sings Gershwin, as an artistic triumph from the Decca period that anticipates the songbook cycle later developed by Norman Granz. Nicholson also reminds us that Decca handled Ella in the era of 78's while Verve handled her in the LP era, a technical reality which limited Decca's recording options.

While Nicholson never denies that Ella's Verve years are her best, he argues that they are not as consistently superlative as the Verve publicity machine has led us to believe. On this point, Nicholson is much influenced by Will Friedwald's Jazz Singing, a 1991 study that is by far the most original and influential ever written on the subject. Friedwald revises downward Ella's songbook cycle, arguing that the orchestral arrangements for the early albums have become dated. Nicholson develops the point further by criticizing arranger Buddy Bregman's "glossy superficiality" in the Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart songbooks, Billy May's over-orchestrating The Harold Arlen Songbook and Duke Ellington's lack of preparation for the songbook dedicated to him. The only songbook Nicholson praises unreservedly is the George and Ira Gershwin Songbook, arranged by Nelson Riddle. Nicholson finds Ella's best work to be her due, trio and quartet albums headed by Paul Smith and Lou Levy (which he discusses thoroughly and intelligently) because of their uncluttered, straight ahead interpretations. His detailed account of discographer Phil Schaap's discovering Ella's Rome concert unmarked in the Polygram vaults makes fascinating reading.

In short, this is a well written, meticulously documented, honest book. The musical analyses re thorough, intelligent, and carefully considered. I disagree with some of Nicholson's assessments (particularly with regard to the songbooks), but one can only respect the process by which he as come to them. Most importantly, any reader, from those casually acquainted with Ella's work to those thoroughly immersed in it, will come away with a clearer image of the woman, her music and its significance.