NONFICTION - Dec. 18, 1994

ELLA FITZGERALD by Stuart Nicholson (Scribner’s: $23; 334 pp.) The first record I ever bought--thick, solid 78--was by Ella Fitzgerald with Louis Jordan: “Stone Cold Dead in de Market (I Kill Nobody But Me Husban’).” It had a swing to it, a snap and a pop, a big, broad smile. It was calypso, of course, but Ella could do it all. Probably still can. Jazz, disco, scat (Lord, could she scat!), standards, bop, chantoosie, blues--maybe not too good on blues; her sound was too literal, too . . . happy. Fitzgerald herself preferred ballads, but as I say, she could do it all. Stuart Nicholson reinforces the notion with as complete a biography as we’re likely to get, too complete, maybe, for the casual connoisseur; where she sang, with whom, what she wore, what she ate, even a 65-page “discography” of every record the lady ever cut. But the essential Ella--the straight-ahead joy, the tone and diction and rhythmic imagination; her ingenuousness, her “simple, optimistic values”--shines through. Her past remains blurry; she wants it that way, and refuses interviews on the subject. Nicholson has dug deep, however, and traces an unremarkable Yonkers childhood to the streets of Harlem, where Fitzgerald survived, barely (“She was scuffling,” a friend recalls, “and didn’t have no place to go.”) Then, “big, gawky, self-conscious, plain,” she inched her way into a crowded filed through force of will and a voice that made audiences forget she was less than Aphrodite. It was simple, really: “Music comes out her,” says pianist Jimmy Rowles. “When she walks down the street, she leaves notes.”