Ella Fitzgerald

Ella Fitzgerald sang like the human voice was a horn that happened to know words. Her pitch was flawless, her tone clear as water, and when she scatted she could trade phrases with any trumpet player in the room and win. She made hard things sound effortless, which is the rarest kind of mastery.

Discovered at 17 at an Apollo amateur night – she’d planned to dance, lost her nerve, sang instead – she spent the next sixty years becoming the most beloved singer in jazz. Where Billie Holiday gave you the wound, Ella gave you the joy. Even a sad song in her hands had a kind of grace that lifted it.

Her crowning work is the Songbook series, where across the late 1950s she recorded the great American composers – Gershwin, Porter, Ellington, Berlin – one by one, definitively. Those records did as much as anything to enshrine those songs as a canon. She wasn’t just singing the standards. She was deciding what the standards were.

Offstage she was shy, even insecure. Onstage none of that showed. She’d swing a room of thousands, scat a chorus that left jaws open, and beam like she couldn’t believe her luck. The luck was ours.