Fitzgerald was often pitted against Billie Holiday in these terms (and still sometimes is), an opposition that Tick acknowledges is reductive. Holiday’s soul-baring—the fact that you can immediately hear her sadness and melancholy—presented itself to critics as evidence: Billie felt more than Ella did; therefore, she thought more. Holiday “was a story-teller who made most of her fans fall in love with her; [Fitzgerald] is a musician,” one early 1960s reviewer wrote. “She thinks notes rather than words.”
This was a common play—to suggest that “words,” for Fitzgerald, were “nonsense sound pegs to hang notes on,” as the scholar Robert O’Meally wrote in his 2000 biography of Holiday. She distinguished herself from Fitzgerald, O’Meally contended, by the fact that only Holiday became a “great interpreter.”
It is not an insult to point out that Fitzgerald treated her performances as a chance to unfasten words from their preferred meanings. But taken out of context, it risks reinforcing the assumption that other critics made: that Fitzgerald didn’t understand the lyrics, or that there was no animating force at all in her singing. Comparing her to Holiday in a 1962 study, the critic Benny Green cast Fitzgerald as a soulless technician. Her songbook albums were “faithful deadpan transcriptions,” but “all the correctitude in the world will not save the performance from artistic damnation.” Compared with Holiday’s impassioned tremulations, Fitzgerald’s performances amounted to “gibberish whose emotive content is roughly nil.”
Even more striking was the claim of the celebrated critic Francis Davis, in a book published 30 years later: “Unlike Judy Garland or Billie Holiday, Fitzgerald is a presentation singer who imposes no subjective weight on her material.”
Fitzgerald needs no rescue from her belittlers, because the performances outshone the criticism. And jazz was under assault from the moment it became an object of mass distribution. Coeval with this development, Gerald Early wrote in 1993, was jazz’s analytic “self-obsession”—its endless need to “legitimate its established mythical historicism while reinventing its history.” Paradoxically, Early claimed, jazz desires the “critical rhetorical analogue that it detests.”
The preoccupations of Fitzgerald’s critics, in a related way, make clear the assumptions she resisted in her performances. On the one hand, her disparagers betrayed a need for the didactic exposition of a song’s meaning, the kind that would satisfy their constrained criteria for sophistication. But singing, for Fitzgerald, was instead a way to destabilize ready-to-hand meanings, sometimes by simply letting a tune (as she was known to do on “How High the Moon” and “Mack the Knife”) spin into a cyclone of free association. For many minutes on end, she could interpolate bits of Chopin and Elvis and Louis Armstrong into collages of sound.