Ella Fitzgerald

Ella Fitzgerald (April 25, 1917 – June 15, 1996), also known as the "First Lady of Song", "Queen of Jazz", and "Lady Ella", was an American jazz vocalist with a vocal range spanning three octaves (D♭3 to D♭6). She was noted for her purity of tone, impeccable diction, phrasing and intonation, and a "horn-like" improvisational ability, particularly in her scat singing.

Fitzgerald was a notable interpreter of the Great American Songbook. Over the course of her 59-year recording career, she sold 40 million copies of her 70-plus albums, won 13 Grammy Awards and was awarded the National Medal of Arts by Ronald Reagan and the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George H. W. Bush.

Early life

Fitzgerald was born in Newport News, Virginia, the daughter of Temperance "Tempie" and William Fitzgerald. The pair separated soon after her birth, and Ella and her mother went to Yonkers, New York, where they eventually moved in with Tempie's longtime boyfriend, Joseph Da Silva. Fitzgerald's half-sister, Frances Da Silva, was born in 1923. She and her family were Methodists and were active in the Bethany African Methodist Episcopal Church, and she regularly attended worship services, Bible study, and Sunday school.

In her youth, Fitzgerald wanted to be a dancer, although she loved listening to jazz recordings by Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby and The Boswell Sisters. She idolized the lead singer Connee Boswell, later saying, "My mother brought home one of her records, and I fell in love with it....I tried so hard to sound just like her."

In 1932, her mother died from a heart attack. Following this trauma, Fitzgerald's grades dropped dramatically, and she frequently skipped school. Abused by her stepfather, she ran away to her aunt and, at one point, worked as a lookout at a bordello and also with a Mafia-affiliated numbers runner. When the authorities caught up with her, she was first placed in the Colored Orphan Asylum in Riverdale, Bronx. However, when the orphanage proved too crowded, she was moved to the New York Training School for Girls in Hudson, New York, a state reformatory. Eventually she escaped and for a time was homeless.

Early career

A young Fitzgerald, photographed by Carl Van Vechten in 1940

She made her singing debut at 17 on November 21, 1934, at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, New York. She pulled in a weekly audience at the Apollo and won the opportunity to compete in one of the earliest of its famous "Amateur Nights". She had originally intended to go on stage and dance, but, intimidated by the Edwards Sisters, a local dance duo, she opted to sing instead in the style of Connee Boswell. She sang Boswell's "Judy" and "The Object of My Affection," a song recorded by the Boswell Sisters, and won the first prize of US$ 25.00.

In January 1935, Fitzgerald won the chance to perform for a week with the Tiny Bradshaw band at the Harlem Opera House. She met drummer and bandleader Chick Webb there. Webb had already hired singer Charlie Linton to work with the band and was, The New York Times later wrote, "reluctant to sign her....because she was gawky and unkempt, a diamond in the rough." Webb offered her the opportunity to test with his band when they played a dance at Yale University.

She began singing regularly with Webb's Orchestra through 1935 at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom. Fitzgerald recorded several hit songs with them, including "Love and Kisses" and "(If You Can't Sing It) You'll Have to Swing It (Mr. Paganini)". But it was her 1938 version of the nursery rhyme, "A-Tisket, A-Tasket", a song she co-wrote, that brought her wide public acclaim.

Chick Webb died on June 16, 1939, and his band was renamed "Ella and her Famous Orchestra" with Ella taking on the role of nominal bandleader. Fitzgerald recorded nearly 150 songs with the orchestra before it broke up in 1942, "the majority of them novelties and disposable pop fluff".

Decca years

Fitzgerald performing with Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Brown, Milt Jackson andTimmie Rosenkrantz in September 1947, New York

In 1942, Fitzgerald left the band to begin a solo career. Now signed to the Decca label, she had several popular hits while recording with such artists as Bill Kenny & The Ink Spots, Louis Jordan, and The Delta Rhythm Boys.

With Decca's Milt Gabler as her manager, she began working regularly for the jazz impresario Norman Granz and appeared regularly in hisJazz at the Philharmonic (JATP) concerts. Fitzgerald's relationship with Granz was further cemented when he became her manager, although it would be nearly a decade before he could record her on one of his many record labels.

With the demise of the Swing era and the decline of the great touring big bands, a major change in jazz music occurred. The advent of bebopled to new developments in Fitzgerald's vocal style, influenced by her work with Dizzy Gillespie's big band. It was in this period that Fitzgerald started including scat singing as a major part of her performance repertoire. While singing with Gillespie, Fitzgerald recalled, "I just tried to do [with my voice] what I heard the horns in the band doing."

Her 1945 scat recording of "Flying Home" arranged by Vic Schoen would later be described by The New York Times as "one of the most influential vocal jazz records of the decade....Where other singers, most notably Louis Armstrong, had tried similar improvisation, no one before Miss Fitzgerald employed the technique with such dazzling inventiveness." Her bebop recording of "Oh, Lady Be Good!" (1947) was similarly popular and increased her reputation as one of the leading jazz vocalists.

Verve years

Fitzgerald was still performing at Granz's JATP concerts by 1955. She left Decca and Granz, now her manager, created Verve Records around her. Fitzgerald later described the period as strategically crucial, saying, "I had gotten to the point where I was only singing be-bop. I thought be-bop was 'it', and that all I had to do was go some place and sing bop. But it finally got to the point where I had no place to sing. I realized then that there was more to music than bop. Norman ... felt that I should do other things, so he produced The Cole Porter Songbookwith me. It was a turning point in my life."

Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook, released in 1956, was the first of eight Songbook sets Fitzgerald would record for Verve at irregular intervals from 1956 to 1964. The composers and lyricists spotlighted on each set, taken together, represent the greatest part of the cultural canon known as the Great American Songbook. Her song selections ranged from standards to rarities and represented an attempt by Fitzgerald to cross over into a non-jazz audience. The sets are the most well-known items in her discography.

Ella Fitzgerald in 1968. Photo courtesy of the Fraser MacPherson estate.

Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Song Book was the only Songbook on which the composer she interpreted played with her. Duke Ellingtonand his longtime collaborator Billy Strayhorn both appeared on exactly half the set's 38 tracks and wrote two new pieces of music for the album: "The E and D Blues" and a four-movement musical portrait of Fitzgerald (the only Songbook track on which Fitzgerald does not sing). The Songbook series ended up becoming the singer's most critically acclaimed and commercially successful work, and probably her most significant offering to American culture. The New York Times wrote in 1996, "These albums were among the first pop records to devote such serious attention to individual songwriters, and they were instrumental in establishing the pop album as a vehicle for serious musical exploration."

A few days after Fitzgerald's death, New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote that in the Songbook series Fitzgerald "performed a cultural transaction as extraordinary as Elvis's contemporaneous integration of white and African American soul. Here was a black woman popularizing urban songs often written by immigrant Jews to a national audience of predominantly white Christians." Frank Sinatra was moved out of respect for Fitzgerald to block Capitol Records from re-releasing his own recordings in a similar, single composer vein.

Fitzgerald also recorded albums exclusively devoted to the songs of Porter and Gershwin in 1972 and 1983; the albums being, respectively, Ella Loves Cole and Nice Work If You Can Get It. A later collection devoted to a single composer was released during her time with Pablo Records, Ella Abraça Jobim, featuring the songs of Antônio Carlos Jobim.

While recording the Songbooks and the occasional studio album, Fitzgerald toured 40 to 45 weeks per year in the United States and internationally, under the tutelage of Norman Granz. Granz helped solidify her position as one of the leading live jazz performers.

On March 15, 1955 Ella Fitzgerald opened her initial engagement at the Mocambo nightclub in Hollywood, after Marilyn Monroe lobbied the owner for the booking. The booking was instrumental in Fitzgerald's career. The incident was turned into a play by Bonnie Greer in 2005. It has been widely reported that Fitzgerald was the first Black performer to play the Mocambo, following Monroe's intervention, but this is not true. African-American singers Herb Jefferies, Eartha Kitt,[16] and Joyce Bryant[17] all played the Mocambo in 1952 and 1953, according to stories published at the time in Jet Magazine and Billboard.

There are several live albums on Verve that are highly regarded by critics. Ella at the Opera House shows a typical JATP set from Fitzgerald. Ella in Rome and Twelve Nights in Hollywood display her vocal jazz canon. Ella in Berlin is still one of her best selling albums; it includes a Grammy-winning performance of "Mack the Knife" in which she forgets the lyrics, but improvises magnificently to compensate.

Verve Records was sold to MGM in 1963 for $3 million and in 1967 MGM failed to renew Fitzgerald's contract. Over the next five years she flitted between Atlantic, Capitol and Reprise. Her material at this time represented a departure from her typical jazz repertoire. For Capitol she recorded Brighten the Corner, an album of hymns, Ella Fitzgerald's Christmas, an album of traditional Christmas carols, Misty Blue, a country and western-influenced album, and 30 by Ella, a series of six medleys that fulfilled her obligations for the label. During this period, she had her last US chart single with a cover of Smokey Robinson's "Get Ready", previously a hit for The Temptations, and some months later a top-five hit for Rare Earth.

The surprise success of the 1972 album Jazz at Santa Monica Civic '72 led Granz to found Pablo Records, his first record label since the sale of Verve. Fitzgerald recorded some 20 albums for the label. Ella in London recorded live in 1974 with pianist Tommy Flanagan, guitarist Joe Pass, bassist Keter Betts and drummer Bobby Durham, was considered by many to be some of her best work. The following year she again performed with Joe Pass on German television station NDR in Hamburg. Her years with Pablo Records also documented the decline in her voice. "She frequently used shorter, stabbing phrases, and her voice was harder, with a wider vibrato", one biographer wrote. Plagued by health problems, Fitzgerald made her last recording in 1991 and her last public performances in 1993.

Later life and death

In 1985 Fitzgerald was hospitalized briefly for respiratory problems, in 1986 for congestive heart failure and in 1990 for exhaustion. In 1993 she had to have both of her legs amputated below the knee due to the effects of diabetes. Her eyesight was affected as well.

She was hospitalized again in 1996 in Niagara Falls, New York, where she was diagnosed with heart failure, and her health continued to decline. Later, tired of being in the hospital, she wished to spend her last days at home. Confined to a wheelchair, she spent her final days in her backyard of her Beverly Hills mansion on Whittier, with her son Ray and 12 year old granddaughter Alice. "I just want to smell the air, listen to the birds and hear Alice laugh," she reportedly said.

On her last day, she was wheeled outside one last time, and sat there for about an hour. She was taken back in, she looked up with a soft smile on her face and said, "I’m ready to go now." She died in her home on June 15, 1996 at the age of 79. A few hours after her death, the Playboy Jazz Festival was launched at the Hollywood Bowl. In tribute, the marquee read: Ella We Will Miss You. Her funeral was private, and she was buried at Inglewood Cemetery in Los Angeles.

Film and television

Fitzgerald shakes hands with PresidentRonald Reagan after performing in theWhite House, 1981

In her most notable screen role, Fitzgerald played the part of singer Maggie Jackson in Jack Webb's 1955 jazz film Pete Kelly's Blues. The film costarred Janet Leigh and singer Peggy Lee. Even though she had already worked in the movies (she had sung briefly in the 1942 Abbott and Costello film Ride 'Em Cowboy), she was "delighted" when Norman Granz negotiated the role for her, and, "at the time....considered her role in the Warner Brothers movie the biggest thing ever to have happened to her." Amid The New York Times pan of the film when it opened in August 1955, the reviewer wrote, "About five minutes (out of ninety-five) suggest the picture this might have been. Take the ingenious prologue ... [or] take the fleeting scenes when the wonderful Ella Fitzgerald, allotted a few spoken lines, fills the screen and sound track with her strong mobile features and voice." Fitzgerald's race precluded major big-screen success. After Pete Kelly's Blues, she appeared in sporadic movie cameos, in St. Louis Blues (1958), and Let No Man Write My Epitaph (1960). Much later, she appeared in the 1980s television drama The White Shadow.

She made numerous guest appearances on television shows, singing on The Frank Sinatra Show, The Andy Williams Show, The Pat Boone Chevy Showroom, and alongside other greats Nat King Cole, Dean Martin, Mel Tormé, and many others. She was also frequently featured on The Ed Sullivan Show. Perhaps her most unusual and intriguing performance was of the "Three Little Maids" song from Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operetta The Mikado alongside Joan Sutherland and Dinah Shore on Shore's weekly variety series in 1963. A performance at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in London was filmed and shown on the BBC. Fitzgerald also made a one-off appearance alongside Sarah Vaughan and Pearl Bailey on a 1979 television special honoring Bailey. In 1980, she performed a medley of standards in a duet with Karen Carpenter on the Carpenters' television program Music, Music, Music.

Fitzgerald also appeared in TV commercials, her most memorable being an ad for Memorex. In the commercials, she sang a note that shattered a glass while being recorded on a Memorex cassette tape. The tape was played back and the recording also broke the glass, asking: "Is it live, or is it Memorex?" She also starred in a number of commercials for Kentucky Fried Chicken, singing and scatting to the fast-food chain's longtime slogan, "We do chicken right!" Her final commercial campaign was for American Express, in which she was photographed by Annie Leibovitz.

Collaborations

Fitzgerald's most famous collaborations were with the vocal quartet Bill Kenny & The Ink Spots, trumpeter Louis Armstrong, the guitarist Joe Pass, and the bandleaders Count Basie andDuke Ellington.

• From 1943 to 1950 Fitzgerald recorded seven songs with The Ink Spots featuring Bill Kenny. Out of all seven recordings, four reached the top of the pop charts including "I'm Making Believe" and "Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall" which both reached #1.
• Fitzgerald recorded three Verve studio albums with Armstrong, two albums of standards (1956's Ella and Louis and 1957's Ella and Louis Again), and a third album featured music from the Gershwin musical Porgy and Bess. Fitzgerald also recorded a number of sides with Armstrong for Decca in the early 1950s.
• Fitzgerald is sometimes referred to as the quintessential swing singer, and her meetings with Count Basie are highly regarded by critics. Fitzgerald features on one track on Basie's 1957 album One O'Clock Jump, while her 1963 album Ella and Basie! is remembered as one of her greatest recordings. With the 'New Testament' Basie band in full swing, and arrangements written by a young Quincy Jones, this album proved a respite from the 'Songbook' recordings and constant touring that Fitzgerald was engaged in during this period. Fitzgerald and Basie also collaborated on the 1972 album Jazz at Santa Monica Civic '72, and on the 1979 albums Digital III at Montreux, A Classy Pair and A Perfect Match.
• Fitzgerald and Joe Pass recorded four albums together toward the end of Fitzgerald's career. She recorded several albums with piano accompaniment, but a guitar proved the perfect melodic foil for her. Fitzgerald and Pass appeared together on the albums Take Love Easy (1973), Easy Living (1986), Speak Love (1983) and Fitzgerald and Pass... Again (1976).
• Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington recorded two live albums, and two studio albums. Her Duke Ellington Songbook placed Ellington firmly in the canon known as the Great American Songbook, and the 1960s saw Fitzgerald and the 'Duke' meet on the Côte d'Azur for the 1966 album Ella and Duke at the Cote D'Azur, and in Sweden for The Stockholm Concert, 1966. Their 1965 album Ella at Duke's Place is also extremely well received.

Fitzgerald had a number of famous jazz musicians and soloists as sidemen over her long career. The trumpeters Roy Eldridge and Dizzy Gillespie, the guitarist Herb Ellis, and the pianistsTommy Flanagan, Oscar Peterson, Lou Levy, Paul Smith, Jimmy Rowles, and Ellis Larkins all worked with Ella mostly in live, small group settings.

Possibly Fitzgerald's greatest unrealized collaboration (in terms of popular music) was a studio or live album with Frank Sinatra. The two appeared on the same stage only periodically over the years, in television specials in 1958 and 1959, and again on 1967's A Man and His Music + Ella + Jobim, a show that also featured Antônio Carlos Jobim. Pianist Paul Smith has said, "Ella loved working with [Frank]. Sinatra gave her his dressing-room on A Man and His Music and couldn't do enough for her." When asked, Norman Granz would cite "complex contractual reasons" for the fact that the two artists never recorded together. Fitzgerald's appearance with Sinatra and Count Basie in June 1974 for a series of concerts at Caesar's Palace, Las Vegas, was seen as an important incentive for Sinatra to return from his self-imposed retirement of the early 1970s. The shows were a great success, and September 1975 saw them gross $1,000,000 in two weeks on Broadway, in a triumvirate with the Count Basie Orchestra.

Awards, citations and honors

Further information: List of awards received by Ella Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald won thirteen Grammy Awards, including one for Lifetime Achievement in 1967.

Other major awards and honors she received during her career were the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Medal of Honor Award, National Medal of Art, first Society of Singers Lifetime Achievement Award, named "Ella" in her honor, Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the George and Ira Gershwin Award for Lifetime Musical Achievement, UCLA Spring Sing. Across town at the University of Southern California, she received the USC "Magnum Opus" Award which hangs in the office of the Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation. In 1990, she received an honorary doctorate of Music from Harvard University.

Personal life

Fitzgerald married at least twice, and there is evidence that she may have married a third time. In 1941 she married Benny Kornegay, a convicted drug dealer and local dockworker. The marriage was annulled after two years.

Her second marriage, in December 1947, was to the famous bass player Ray Brown, whom she had met while on tour with Dizzy Gillespie's band a year earlier. Together they adopted a child born to Fitzgerald's half-sister, Frances, whom they christened Ray Brown, Jr. With Fitzgerald and Brown often busy touring and recording, the child was largely raised by her aunt, Virginia. Fitzgerald and Brown divorced in 1953, bowing to the various career pressures both were experiencing at the time, though they would continue to perform together.

In July 1957, Reuters reported that Fitzgerald had secretly married Thor Einar Larsen, a young Norwegian, in Oslo. She had even gone as far as furnishing an apartment in Oslo, but the affair was quickly forgotten when Larsen was sentenced to five months hard labor in Sweden for stealing money from a young woman to whom he had previously been engaged.

Fitzgerald was also notoriously shy. Trumpet player Mario Bauzá, who played behind Fitzgerald in her early years with Chick Webb, remembered that "she didn’t hang out much. When she got into the band, she was dedicated to her music....She was a lonely girl around New York, just kept herself to herself, for the gig." When, later in her career, the Society of Singersnamed an award after her, Fitzgerald explained, "I don't want to say the wrong thing, which I always do but I think I do better when I sing."

Fitzgerald was a quiet but ardent supporter of many charities and non-profit organizations, including the American Heart Association and the City of Hope Medical Center. In 1993, she established the Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation.

Albums

Decca

From 1935 to the late 1940s Decca issued Ella Fitzgerald's recordings on 78rpm singles and album collections, in book form, of four singles that included eight tracks. These recordings have been re-issued on a series of 15 compact disc by the French record label Classics Records between 1992 and 2008.

1950

• Ella Sings Gershwin

1954

• Songs in a Mellow Mood
• Lullabies of Birdland

1955

• For Sentimental Reasons (A collection of previously available recordings from the late 1940s and early 1950s)
• Miss Ella Fitzgerald & Mr Gordon Jenkins Invite You to Listen and Relax (A collection of previously available recordings from the late 1940s and early 1950s)
• Sweet and Hot

Verve

Ella Fitzgerald released many stand alone singles throughout her Verve years, these were re-issued in 2003 on the 2-CD set, Jukebox Ella: The Complete Verve Singles, Vol. 1. Studio and live albums released at a later date are also included here.

1956

• Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook
• Ella and Louis (with Louis Armstrong)
• Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers & Hart Songbook

1957

• Ella and Louis Again (with Louis Armstrong)
• Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Songbook (with Duke Ellington) – Grammy Award for Best Jazz Performance, Soloist
• Like Someone in Love
• Porgy and Bess (with Louis Armstrong)

1958

• Ella at the Opera House (Live)
• Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday at Newport (Live) (Reissued with tracks featuring Carmen McRae in 2001)
• Ella Swings Lightly – Grammy Award for Best Jazz Performance, Soloist
• Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Irving Berlin Songbook – Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance
• Ella in Rome: The Birthday Concert (Live) (Released in 1988)
• Ella Fitzgerald live at Mister Kelly's (Live) (Released in 2007)

1959

• Get Happy!
• Ella Fitzgerald Sings Sweet Songs for Swingers
• Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Songbook – Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance

1960

• Ella in Berlin: Mack the Knife (Live) – Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance
• Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas
• Hello, Love
• Ella Fitzgerald Sings Songs from Let No Man Write My Epitaph (Available on CD as The Intimate Ella)

1961

• Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Harold Arlen Songbook
• Ella in Hollywood (Live)
• Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie!
• Ella Returns to Berlin (Live) (Released in 1991)
• Twelve Nights In Hollywood (Live) (Released in 2009)

1962

• Rhythm Is My Business
• Ella Swings Brightly with Nelson – Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance
• Ella Swings Gently with Nelson

1963

• Ella Sings Broadway
• Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Jerome Kern Songbook
• Ella and Basie! (with Count Basie)
• These Are the Blues

1964

• Hello, Dolly!
• Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Johnny Mercer Songbook
• Ella at Juan-Les-Pins (Live)
• Ella in Japan: 'S Wonderful (Live) (Released in 2011)

1965

• Ella in Hamburg (Live)
• Ella at Duke's Place (with Duke Ellington)

1966

• Whisper Not
• Ella and Duke at the Cote D'Azur (Live) (with Duke Ellington)

[edit]Capitol

1967

• Brighten the Corner
• Ella Fitzgerald's Christmas

1968

• 30 by Ella
• Misty Blue

[edit]MPS Records

1969

• Sunshine of your Love (Live)

Reprise

1969

• Ella

1970

• Things Ain't What They Used to Be (And You Better Believe It)

Atlantic

1972

• Ella Loves Cole (Released on the Pablo label as Dream Dancing)

Columbia

1973

• Newport Jazz Festival: Live at Carnegie Hall (Live)

Pablo

1966

• The Stockholm Concert, 1966 (Live) (with Duke Ellington) (Released in 1984)

1967

• The Greatest Jazz Concert in the World (Live) (with Duke Ellington) (Released in 1990)

1970

• Ella in Budapest, Hungary (Live) (Released in 1999)

1971

• Ella à Nice (Live)

1972

• Jazz at Santa Monica Civic '72 (Live)

1973

• Take Love Easy (with Joe Pass)

1974

• Fine and Mellow (Released in 1979) – Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal
• Ella in London (Live)

1975

• Ella and Oscar (with Oscar Peterson)
• Montreux '75 (Live)

1976

• Fitzgerald and Pass... Again (with Joe Pass) – Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal

1977

• Montreux '77 (Live)

1978

• Lady Time
• Dream Dancing (First released on the Atlantic label as Ella Loves Cole)

1979

• Digital III at Montreux (Live) – Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, Female
• A Classy Pair (with Count Basie)
• A Perfect Match (Live) (with Count Basie) – Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, Female

1981

• Ella Abraça Jobim

1982

• The Best Is Yet to Come – Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, Female

1983

• Speak Love (with Joe Pass)
• Nice Work If You Can Get It (with André Previn)

1986

• Easy Living (with Joe Pass)

1989

• All That Jazz – Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, Female

2001

• Sophisticated Lady (Live) (with Joe Pass) (recorded in 1975, 1983)

Notable guest appearances

1953

• JATP In Tokyo - Live at the Nichigeki Theatre 1953' (Live in Tokyo with Jazz at the Philharmonic)

1955

• Songs from Pete Kelly's Blues

1956

• Jazz at the Hollywood Bowl (Live in Hollywood with Jazz at the Philharmonic)

1957

• One O'Clock Jump (with Count Basie and Joe Williams)
• Classic Duets (Three duets with Frank Sinatra, recorded for the 1957 ABC television The Frank Sinatra Show; released in 2002 by Capitol Records.

1983

• Jazz at the Philharmonic – Yoyogi National Stadium, Tokyo 1983: Return to Happiness (Live in Tokyo with Jazz at the Philharmonic)

1989

• Back on the Block (Qwest Records)

Boxed sets and collections

• 1994 The Complete Ella Fitzgerald Songbooks
• 1995 Ella: The Legendary Decca Recordings
• 1997 The Complete Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong on Verve