Books by Judith Tick
“We don’t know everything about Ella Fitzgerald. We’re not even sure how many times she was married. That’s extraordinary, given how famous she is and was in her lifetime…One of the things that I like so much about Tick’s book, which came out in 2023, is the way in which she is able to take the details that we have of Ella Fitzgerald’s life and apply them to the art. The subtitle, ‘The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song’, is really important because that’s what she shows in the book. Ella Fitzgerald was able to reinvent the role of the singer in jazz and turn it into something which was not a poor relation to the horn players, but an absolute equal. Ella knew what she wanted. She was a band leader as well. She had a tremendous musical brain.” Read more...
Andrew Ford, Musicians, Music Critics & Scholar
Interviews where books by Judith Tick were recommended
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1
Hildegard of Bingen
by Fiona Maddocks -
2
Arnold Schoenberg
by Charles Rosen -
3
Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century
by Paul Kildea -
4
Elisabeth Lutyens and Edward Clark: The Orchestration of Progress in British Twentieth-Century Music
by Annika Forkert -
5
Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song
by Judith Tick
The Best Music Biographies, recommended by Andrew Ford
The Best Music Biographies, recommended by Andrew Ford
Biographies of musicians are a good way to learn more about music without getting too technical, argues musicologist and composer Andrew Ford, author of the brilliant Shortest History of Music. He chooses five of his favorite music biographies, books that set “a life in the context of the times and a musical life in the context of the music.”
