A Road Not Taken by Ella Fitzgerald : Jazz: She could have become a dancer on a fateful day in 1934. Opting to sing instead, she’s clung to her roots and kept a youthful outlook. She performs in Costa Mesa tonight.

In an interview before their appearance this past August at the Hollywood Bowl, 83-year-old saxophonist Benny Carter talked about the first time he saw Ella Fitzgerald sing.

“It was 1934, and she was doing the amateur show at the Apollo Theatre in New York,” Carter said of the now-legendary night when a 15-year-old Fitzgerald, worried that her legs were too skinny, made an instant career change. “She was going to enter a dance contest there and something happened that changed her mind and she sang instead. And that was the beginning of history.”

Is that really the way it happened?

“Oh yes,” Fitzgerald, who appears tonight at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, said recently in a phone conversation from her home in Beverly Hills. “I went on stage to dance. I had made a bet with a girlfriend of mine. We had signed up for the amateur hour, and she told me I would be chicken if I didn’t go out and do it. And of all the times for it to happen, I was the first amateur they called out.

“When I saw all those people, I lost my nerve. And the man said, ‘You’re out here, you have to do something.’ So I tried to do a song that my mother was madly in love with that was sung by Miss Conee Boswell--she played that record all the time. So I started to sing and won first prize. But there was no way in the world that I was going out there to dance.”

The saxophonist was so impressed with the singer’s Apollo Theatre performance that he took her to meet bandleader Fletcher Henderson.

“But he didn’t want a girl singer at the time,” Fitzgerald recalls. “He told me, ‘Don’t call me, I’ll call you.’ ”

The turndown from Henderson was only a brief pause in the singer’s rise to stardom. Fitzgerald was soon recording with drummer Chick Webb’s band, and, by 1937, she won the first of many Down Beat magazine polls, an honor she shared that year with Bing Crosby.

Carter, who’s worked on and off with Fitzgerald in the last 55 years and appears on her most recent album, “All That Jazz,” recorded in 1989, still has high praise for the singer. “Ella’s singing is indescribable,” he said. “She’s a creator who uses her instrument just as the guy who blows into his saxophone. She has such acute hearing that she can hear the changes that are being played and create accordingly. She’s a great talent.”

Fitzgerald credits her mother with developing the aspiring singer’s musical taste. “She listened to records all the time. Conee Boswell was one of her favorites--that’s how I started to sing “Object of My Affection” and “Judy”--and so was Bessie Smith. The Mills Brothers had just become popular, and she liked them.”

“I love to sing and I love people and that has been what’s got me through,” she says of her success. Fitzgerald’s incalculable popularity has come from her willingness to embrace a number of song styles and not just limit herself to jazz. She constructed her most recognizable hit, “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” in 1938 from the well-known children’s rhyme, with help from arranger Van Alexander.

“The first place we played it,” she says, “was Boston, Mass., and it was an overnight sensation, I think because people remembered the game. I never get tired of performing that one.”

Her audience widened considerably beginning in 1956 when producer Norman Granz enlisted the singer to do a number of recordings with music from various composers. The first of these, “Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Song Book,” became an immediate sensation. Collections from Rodgers and Hart, George and Ira Gershwin, Duke Ellington and Harold Arlen soon followed.

“At the time I was with (Granz’s) Jazz at the Philharmonic, and he thought a lot of the jazz clubs were closing and that it was time to do something different. And the songbook went over so well, we just continued doing that kind of thing. I’m very grateful to him for that because it was like opening up a new thing for me, a new beginning. I not only had my jazz fans, I had people who like the pretty tunes. . . .

“In music, it’s good to try a little of everything. That way, I feel like what I’m doing is trying to satisfy the whole audience. There’s always somebody who comes up and says, ‘You didn’t do my song.’ So we try to do a little something from all the composers. When I don’t remember the words, I make up my own.”

Despite health problems in the last few years--she had quintuple heart bypass surgery in 1986, and a severe virus caused her to cancel some of her engagements this summer--Fitzgerald maintains the optimism and youthful outlook that has separated her from singers like Billie Holiday. This outlook is reflected in her aspiration to do a video that would recall her roots as a young dancer and singer, one that would embrace her fondness of children. “I’d love to do that. And I would love to do something that would give inspiration to the young ones, the little children. I’d like to do some songs like ‘Muffin Man,’ ‘A-Tisket, A-Tasket’ and a couple of things that are popular that the kids would like and let them dance. And I’d do a little dance.”

She also wants to study Spanish and do an album in the language someday.

“When I go to the market, I sing a couple little songs in Spanish for the kids there. They like it, so I thought I might like to do an album--I’ve done one in Portuguese. Those are the things that keep you going, when each day you’re learning something. It might sound corny, but that’s what I believe.”

Ella Fitzgerald sings tonight at 8 at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tickets: $20 to $50. Information: (714) 556-2787.