“This is it. I have a real singer now. That's what the public wants.”
- Chick Webb, NPR review of a Chick Webb box-set (2013)
No one really knows the year of William Henry “Chick” Webb’s birth - some say 1905, but they wrote 1909 on his tombstone - but he was born in Baltimore, MD. While he would become one of the most famous drummers of his era, the path he took to playing that instrument has to be rare in music history, if not unique. A spill down the household stairs as (according to Wikipedia) an infant crushed several vertebrae; tuberculosis crept into his spine furthering the damage, “leaving him with short stature and a badly deformed spine which caused him to appear hunchbacked.” In a diagnosis that sounds straight out of the times, a doctor suggested Webb pick up the drums in order to “loosen up” his bones. Whether medically-sound or not, doctor's orders paid off...but Downbeat Magazine’s 1937 edition used some tres passe phrasing to hail Webb at the height of his success:
‘The Rise of a Crippled Genius”
Webb never let his childhood injury hold him back. He moved to Harlem at age 17, where he signed on to a number of tours and sustained other acts through residencies and generally established himself in one of jazz’s hottest scenes. It didn’t take long either, as noted in an article posted on the site Modern Drummer:
“In 1926, the drummer formed his first band and began performing at various NYC jazz clubs, including Black Bottom, Roseland, The Cotton Club, and the Strand Roof. As the ’20s came to a close, Webb’s band—dubbed The Harlem Stompers—gradually picked up more members, eventually growing into a full-size eleven-piece big band.”
By 1931, Webb established his orchestra as the house band for the Savoy Ballroom, a premier club in Harlem. Though unable to read music, he managed his band just fine by memorizing the arrangements and guiding them through from a platform in the middle of stage. His reputation grew through the early 1930s, but, per the quote up top, he thought it would take a star vocalist for him to breaktrough. Webb’s orchestra played behind a guy named Charles Linton, “an old-school crooner…with pre-jazz-age enunciation.” And then came 1935 and Ella Fitzgerald…
Ella Jane Fitzgerald started her life several states to the south, in Newport News, Virginia, and somewhere around a decade later than Webb (1917). Her birth parents, William Fitzgerald and Temperance “Tempie” Henry, never married, but a stepfather, a Portuguese immigrant named Joseph da Silva, came into her life before she turned three. The family relocated to Yonkers by the time Ella Fitzgerald started school and she had a stable childhood through this period. She developed a love of music by way of attending Bethany African Methodist Episcopal Church and expressed it early by performing for classmates as early as the third grade. Her mother goosed the inspiration by bringing home records of her favorites, including Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, and Ella’s favorite, Connee Boswell of the Boswell Sisters. All that unraveled with the death of her mother after a car accident in 1932.
A short time living with her stepfather ended abruptly when she moved to Harlem in 1933 to live with an aunt. Rumors of abuse hovered over her departure, which, on a pop psychology level, could explain why Fitzgerald stumbled into the wrong crowd at that time. While all the sources I read agree that she rarely spoke to this period of her life, her official biography serves up a charmingly doe-eyed spin on her time as a “numbers” runner and a lookout for a bordello ("perhaps naive to the circumstances"). When when the cops pinched her, the state moved her on to a couple juvenile reform institutions, first, the “Colored Orphan Asylum” in the Bronx, then later to the New York Training School for Girls in Hudson, New York (which is a ways up the Hudson). When that sorry period ended, she returned to Harlem still an orphan and still very young.
Perhaps lifted by the voice that would make her famous, Fitzgerald’s love of performing never left, so she signed up for one of the Apollo Theater’s early Amateur Nights. She’d originally planned on dancing, but, on seeing a dance performance she knew she couldn’t keep up with (by an act her official bio dubbed the “frenzied Edwards Sisters”), Fitzgerald decided to sing instead. Online sources romanticize her unassuming clothing for the night (“disheveled” is the favorite word) in two ways: Wikipedia for screwing her out of the prize for winning that night, a chance to perform on the Apollo stage for a week, her official bio for lowering the audience’s expectation; Fitzgerald started her performance with a rendition of “Judy” and, after her performance made the audience forget her clothes, she sang “The Object of My Affection” for an encore. And it’s worth borrowing a quote from the future to underscore how special her voice was:
“Her voice was flexible, wide-ranging, accurate and ageless. She could sing sultry ballads, sweet jazz and imitate every instrument in an orchestra. She worked with all the jazz greats, from Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Nat King Cole, to Frank Sinatra, Dizzy Gillespie and Benny Goodman. (Or rather, some might say all the jazz greats had the pleasure of working with Ella.)”
Notice who’s missing from that roll-call...
A saxophonist/arranger named Benny Carter, who played that same Amateur Night, contacted Fitzgerald after the show and helped her with introductions around town. Whether she found it herself or Carter steered her to it, the still teen-aged Fitzgerald won a chance to perform at the Harlem Opera House with Tiny Bradshaw’s band. Bradshaw, in turn, introduced her to Webb. At least one account claims that Webb struggled to look past Fitzgerald’s attire (the words this time, “gawky and unkempt”), but she impressed him enough that he gave her a shot to prove she had the chops by performing at a Yale University dance. Fitzgerald nailed her debut and Webb took her on at $12.50 a week.
That brings the story to the mid-1930s, the Chick Webb’s orchestra glory days at the Savoy. With one of the hottest bands in town and with a budding star fronting it, Webb threw it into one battle of the bands after another. Not even the household names of the swing era - e.g., Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Count Basie - scared him off. The most famous of them all was the battle against Basie's orchestra. The record wobbles a little on which band won - e.g., as noted in my entry on Basie, one report said Basie won it walking away, but Webb’s Wikipedia page calls the result disputed - but the same source admits Ellington got him once.
Chick Webb’s orchestra was riding high and in its prime, only to have Webb’s health give out. His decline started with fatigue and discomfort, but he later had nights where he’d collapse after leaving the stage. He battled as long as he could - in part to keep his band employed during the Depression - but Webb eventually surrendered and went in for a major operation in 1939 to resolve the issue. It failed and Webb died when his tuberculosis (called Pott Disease by that time) caught up with him in June 1939. His last words rank among the best I’ve ever read, “I’m sorry, I’ve got to go.”
Despite his short life and all the things he refused to allow to get in his way, Webb left his mark, particularly on the drummers of his genre and era:
“His amazing technique, syncopated phrasing, and dazzling showmanship made him the idol of many drumming greats, including Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, Art Blakey, and Max Roach.”
Between her reputation and closeness to Webb - though, for the record, all sources agree that rumors that Webb and his wife Sally adopted her are false - Fitzgerald inherited the work of keeping his orchestra together and employed. And she succeeded for quite a while, particularly for someone still only 22 years old. Per Wikipedia’s note on the period that straddled Webb's death:
"Webb died of spinal tuberculosis on June 16, 1939, and his band was renamed Ella and Her Famous Orchestra with Fitzgerald taking on the role of bandleader. She recorded nearly 150 songs with Webb's orchestra between 1935 and 1942. In addition to her work with Webb, Fitzgerald performed and recorded with the Benny Goodman Orchestra. She had her own side project, too, known as Ella Fitzgerald and Her Savoy Eight.”
Because I couldn’t figure out how to fit it into the narrative, I’ve neglected one detail in the above: Fitzgerald knew enough about music to co-write a break-through for both her and Webb, a riff on a nursery rhyme called, “A-Tisket, A-Tasket.” In a touching (and hopefully accurate) reach, the NPR piece quoted up top speculates that she intended another song co-wrote, “You Showed Me the Way,” as a thank-you to Chick Webb. The point of all that, and with light regret about not flagging more songs in the above, I flagged those songs to underscore the thought that Ella Fitzgerald didn’t back into anything…
…and that’s where I want to leave Ella Fitzgerald’s story until I can figure out when, how and whether to get to the rest of her story. Chick Webb was a good life, though, because he lived it like a lion.
About the Sampler
Because my wife had a Webb/Fitzgerald collection called Swingsation that she played often enough when we first got together, I got in my own way a little bit on this sampler - i.e., I tried to go into a four-volume Decca collection with an open mind, but kept gravitating back to the songs I knew. Those include: “A Little Bit Later On,” “All Over Nothing at All,” “Holiday in Harlem,” “Sing Me A Swing Song (And Let Me Dance),” “Everyone’s Wrong but Me,” and “I Got a Guy.”
The sources handed me several more, most of them famous recordings, some she had a hand in writing, e.g.: “Love and Kisses,” “(If You Can’t Sing It) You’ll Have to Swing It,” “Don’t Be That Way,” and “Blue Lou” - but I grabbed a selection fairly quickly to give it a little more time. Those include: “Vote for Mister Rhythm,” “Darktown Strutters Ball” (old, old tune; I just geek out on versions by now), “Rock It for Me,” “I’ll Chase the Blues Away,” “If You Ever Should Leave,” “Blue Minor,” and “I Want to Be Happy.”
All those sound different, but have the same, for lack of a better word, finished quality that the big band/swing bands achieved by the time the 1930s became the 1940s. Even with Chick Webb banging away on the drums, she definitely lands on the sweet side of jazz - though, later, I hear she moved into popular bebop. The older recordings might not hold up against modern ones, by any means, but you can hear everything and close enough to its original pitch to knock a lot of bricks off the barrier. While that helps it sound modern, the fact the enough of these arrangements share the same basic structure with most modern pop music helps carry it even closer to the familiar. Or, more bluntly, the stuff Chick and Ella laid down doesn’t have half the barrier to entry that most of the music in this series has. And that probably makes it easier for me to not just sit through, but enjoy with less translation.
Till the next one…which goes backwards a bit (dammit). Also, she/they are referenced above, hence the switch. Again, till then…
- Chick Webb, NPR review of a Chick Webb box-set (2013)
No one really knows the year of William Henry “Chick” Webb’s birth - some say 1905, but they wrote 1909 on his tombstone - but he was born in Baltimore, MD. While he would become one of the most famous drummers of his era, the path he took to playing that instrument has to be rare in music history, if not unique. A spill down the household stairs as (according to Wikipedia) an infant crushed several vertebrae; tuberculosis crept into his spine furthering the damage, “leaving him with short stature and a badly deformed spine which caused him to appear hunchbacked.” In a diagnosis that sounds straight out of the times, a doctor suggested Webb pick up the drums in order to “loosen up” his bones. Whether medically-sound or not, doctor's orders paid off...but Downbeat Magazine’s 1937 edition used some tres passe phrasing to hail Webb at the height of his success:
‘The Rise of a Crippled Genius”
Webb never let his childhood injury hold him back. He moved to Harlem at age 17, where he signed on to a number of tours and sustained other acts through residencies and generally established himself in one of jazz’s hottest scenes. It didn’t take long either, as noted in an article posted on the site Modern Drummer:
“In 1926, the drummer formed his first band and began performing at various NYC jazz clubs, including Black Bottom, Roseland, The Cotton Club, and the Strand Roof. As the ’20s came to a close, Webb’s band—dubbed The Harlem Stompers—gradually picked up more members, eventually growing into a full-size eleven-piece big band.”
By 1931, Webb established his orchestra as the house band for the Savoy Ballroom, a premier club in Harlem. Though unable to read music, he managed his band just fine by memorizing the arrangements and guiding them through from a platform in the middle of stage. His reputation grew through the early 1930s, but, per the quote up top, he thought it would take a star vocalist for him to breaktrough. Webb’s orchestra played behind a guy named Charles Linton, “an old-school crooner…with pre-jazz-age enunciation.” And then came 1935 and Ella Fitzgerald…
Ella Jane Fitzgerald started her life several states to the south, in Newport News, Virginia, and somewhere around a decade later than Webb (1917). Her birth parents, William Fitzgerald and Temperance “Tempie” Henry, never married, but a stepfather, a Portuguese immigrant named Joseph da Silva, came into her life before she turned three. The family relocated to Yonkers by the time Ella Fitzgerald started school and she had a stable childhood through this period. She developed a love of music by way of attending Bethany African Methodist Episcopal Church and expressed it early by performing for classmates as early as the third grade. Her mother goosed the inspiration by bringing home records of her favorites, including Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, and Ella’s favorite, Connee Boswell of the Boswell Sisters. All that unraveled with the death of her mother after a car accident in 1932.
A short time living with her stepfather ended abruptly when she moved to Harlem in 1933 to live with an aunt. Rumors of abuse hovered over her departure, which, on a pop psychology level, could explain why Fitzgerald stumbled into the wrong crowd at that time. While all the sources I read agree that she rarely spoke to this period of her life, her official biography serves up a charmingly doe-eyed spin on her time as a “numbers” runner and a lookout for a bordello ("perhaps naive to the circumstances"). When when the cops pinched her, the state moved her on to a couple juvenile reform institutions, first, the “Colored Orphan Asylum” in the Bronx, then later to the New York Training School for Girls in Hudson, New York (which is a ways up the Hudson). When that sorry period ended, she returned to Harlem still an orphan and still very young.
Perhaps lifted by the voice that would make her famous, Fitzgerald’s love of performing never left, so she signed up for one of the Apollo Theater’s early Amateur Nights. She’d originally planned on dancing, but, on seeing a dance performance she knew she couldn’t keep up with (by an act her official bio dubbed the “frenzied Edwards Sisters”), Fitzgerald decided to sing instead. Online sources romanticize her unassuming clothing for the night (“disheveled” is the favorite word) in two ways: Wikipedia for screwing her out of the prize for winning that night, a chance to perform on the Apollo stage for a week, her official bio for lowering the audience’s expectation; Fitzgerald started her performance with a rendition of “Judy” and, after her performance made the audience forget her clothes, she sang “The Object of My Affection” for an encore. And it’s worth borrowing a quote from the future to underscore how special her voice was:
“Her voice was flexible, wide-ranging, accurate and ageless. She could sing sultry ballads, sweet jazz and imitate every instrument in an orchestra. She worked with all the jazz greats, from Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Nat King Cole, to Frank Sinatra, Dizzy Gillespie and Benny Goodman. (Or rather, some might say all the jazz greats had the pleasure of working with Ella.)”
Notice who’s missing from that roll-call...
A saxophonist/arranger named Benny Carter, who played that same Amateur Night, contacted Fitzgerald after the show and helped her with introductions around town. Whether she found it herself or Carter steered her to it, the still teen-aged Fitzgerald won a chance to perform at the Harlem Opera House with Tiny Bradshaw’s band. Bradshaw, in turn, introduced her to Webb. At least one account claims that Webb struggled to look past Fitzgerald’s attire (the words this time, “gawky and unkempt”), but she impressed him enough that he gave her a shot to prove she had the chops by performing at a Yale University dance. Fitzgerald nailed her debut and Webb took her on at $12.50 a week.
That brings the story to the mid-1930s, the Chick Webb’s orchestra glory days at the Savoy. With one of the hottest bands in town and with a budding star fronting it, Webb threw it into one battle of the bands after another. Not even the household names of the swing era - e.g., Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Count Basie - scared him off. The most famous of them all was the battle against Basie's orchestra. The record wobbles a little on which band won - e.g., as noted in my entry on Basie, one report said Basie won it walking away, but Webb’s Wikipedia page calls the result disputed - but the same source admits Ellington got him once.
Chick Webb’s orchestra was riding high and in its prime, only to have Webb’s health give out. His decline started with fatigue and discomfort, but he later had nights where he’d collapse after leaving the stage. He battled as long as he could - in part to keep his band employed during the Depression - but Webb eventually surrendered and went in for a major operation in 1939 to resolve the issue. It failed and Webb died when his tuberculosis (called Pott Disease by that time) caught up with him in June 1939. His last words rank among the best I’ve ever read, “I’m sorry, I’ve got to go.”
Despite his short life and all the things he refused to allow to get in his way, Webb left his mark, particularly on the drummers of his genre and era:
“His amazing technique, syncopated phrasing, and dazzling showmanship made him the idol of many drumming greats, including Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, Art Blakey, and Max Roach.”
Between her reputation and closeness to Webb - though, for the record, all sources agree that rumors that Webb and his wife Sally adopted her are false - Fitzgerald inherited the work of keeping his orchestra together and employed. And she succeeded for quite a while, particularly for someone still only 22 years old. Per Wikipedia’s note on the period that straddled Webb's death:
"Webb died of spinal tuberculosis on June 16, 1939, and his band was renamed Ella and Her Famous Orchestra with Fitzgerald taking on the role of bandleader. She recorded nearly 150 songs with Webb's orchestra between 1935 and 1942. In addition to her work with Webb, Fitzgerald performed and recorded with the Benny Goodman Orchestra. She had her own side project, too, known as Ella Fitzgerald and Her Savoy Eight.”
Because I couldn’t figure out how to fit it into the narrative, I’ve neglected one detail in the above: Fitzgerald knew enough about music to co-write a break-through for both her and Webb, a riff on a nursery rhyme called, “A-Tisket, A-Tasket.” In a touching (and hopefully accurate) reach, the NPR piece quoted up top speculates that she intended another song co-wrote, “You Showed Me the Way,” as a thank-you to Chick Webb. The point of all that, and with light regret about not flagging more songs in the above, I flagged those songs to underscore the thought that Ella Fitzgerald didn’t back into anything…
…and that’s where I want to leave Ella Fitzgerald’s story until I can figure out when, how and whether to get to the rest of her story. Chick Webb was a good life, though, because he lived it like a lion.
About the Sampler
Because my wife had a Webb/Fitzgerald collection called Swingsation that she played often enough when we first got together, I got in my own way a little bit on this sampler - i.e., I tried to go into a four-volume Decca collection with an open mind, but kept gravitating back to the songs I knew. Those include: “A Little Bit Later On,” “All Over Nothing at All,” “Holiday in Harlem,” “Sing Me A Swing Song (And Let Me Dance),” “Everyone’s Wrong but Me,” and “I Got a Guy.”
The sources handed me several more, most of them famous recordings, some she had a hand in writing, e.g.: “Love and Kisses,” “(If You Can’t Sing It) You’ll Have to Swing It,” “Don’t Be That Way,” and “Blue Lou” - but I grabbed a selection fairly quickly to give it a little more time. Those include: “Vote for Mister Rhythm,” “Darktown Strutters Ball” (old, old tune; I just geek out on versions by now), “Rock It for Me,” “I’ll Chase the Blues Away,” “If You Ever Should Leave,” “Blue Minor,” and “I Want to Be Happy.”
All those sound different, but have the same, for lack of a better word, finished quality that the big band/swing bands achieved by the time the 1930s became the 1940s. Even with Chick Webb banging away on the drums, she definitely lands on the sweet side of jazz - though, later, I hear she moved into popular bebop. The older recordings might not hold up against modern ones, by any means, but you can hear everything and close enough to its original pitch to knock a lot of bricks off the barrier. While that helps it sound modern, the fact the enough of these arrangements share the same basic structure with most modern pop music helps carry it even closer to the familiar. Or, more bluntly, the stuff Chick and Ella laid down doesn’t have half the barrier to entry that most of the music in this series has. And that probably makes it easier for me to not just sit through, but enjoy with less translation.
Till the next one…which goes backwards a bit (dammit). Also, she/they are referenced above, hence the switch. Again, till then…
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