Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song
Incisive, doggedly researched ... Tick...proves an ideal guide to Fitzgerald’s perpetual progress ... With few survivors of Fitzgerald’s era left to interview, Tick makes vigorous use of press coverage, yielding particularly fruitful results from Black newspapers and periodicals that covered seemingly every move the singer made ... This is a book that clearly took a long time to research and write; its insights are deeply ingrained, its observations carefully rendered rather than overstated ... Vivid.
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Fitzgerald has proved to be a difficult subject for biographers ... Academic language creeps like mold into this biography ... Tick clearly reveres Fitzgerald’s music, but her prose is buttoned-up. She can’t quite transmit her enthusiasms or make her distinctions stick ... It’s poor sportsmanship, perhaps, to write about what isn’t in a book as opposed to what is. But even browsing a Sotheby’s catalog of Fitzgerald memorabilia auctioned in 1997 gives you a deeper sense of her personal style than Tick manages to convey.
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Tick’s thoughtful and thorough biography traces Fitzgerald’s career ... Tick draws a picture of an idol who, regardless of the joy she gave, suffered from the neurotic notion that the crowds, like that first audience at the Apollo, could not be counted on to like her or her music.
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