“Speaking with the Hands and Eyes”: Ella Fitzgerald's Art of Signifying

With few exceptions, jazz seems to have been a male affair, not without a certain chauvinist connotation. Yet, jazz singing is the realm of women: although several male singers have left significant traces, none of them, aside from Louis Armstrong, can compare to such artists like Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan or Ella Fitzgerald. The latter is a case in point: scholars have already called attention to her attitude towards quotation as a means of constructing sense within the jazz performance. On the other hand, quotation seems to be one of the main topics in order to understand the complex relationships between originality and imitation in jazz, the interpretive context being the one proposed by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his groundbreaking study on African-American literary tradition: as Gates himself has pointed out, Signifyin(g) plays an important role in the art of jazz musicians, as is the case with Count Basie and Oscar Peterson. Just to confine ourselves to the imitation of instrumental music, Fitzgerald‘s procedures can in most cases be seen as a sort of winning competition with her colleagues, both direct and indirect. Indirect competition takes place when the singer lets the audience recognize her 'competitor' by quoting from music composed (or usually played) by him; while we can speak of direct competition when Ella imitates the sound of someone who is participating in that same performance. In both cases, the singer‘s mix of liking and irony, complicity and distance, together with her supreme technical skill, create a unique art event, which can fully be appreciated only by also considering the visual implications of her embodied performance. The result has always the power to successfully challenge the supposed male superiority in the field of jazz improvisation.