It's Ella's world. We just live in it.
I had not thought of Ella Fitzgerald in awhile.
I had not played her jazzy duets with Louis Armstrong, or caught that voice on the radio.
But there she was, singing Gershwin -- "Our Love Is Here to Stay" -- in cycle class at the YMCA. It was an odd setting for her sweet voice, nestled between a driving techno-beat and Elvis.
All the sweaty souls seemed to exhale, relax and let Ella flow over them.
It's ironic that a voice so pure and fine rose out of such rough beginnings. When she was a teenager, her mother died after being injured in a car accident.
She bounced around, lived with friends and relatives and skipped school. She was sent to reform school and was even homeless.
I grew up listening to her songbooks of the great American composers -- Gershwin, Cole Porter, Duke Ellington and others.
My father, on his own since eighth grade, could relate to the life and the music. He loved her and made us love her, too.
From the gym it's on to the post office, where I find Ella staring down at me from a poster advertising her stamp in the Black Heritage series.
"Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996) was widely known as `the first lady of song.' Her extraordinary vocal range and flexibility, combined with her gift for pitch, rhythmic sense, and flawless diction, made her one of America's most distinctive singers of jazz and popular tunes."
I send the postal clerk searching for more.
Write a check for the mortgage, and scat a little bit. Why not?
All it takes for the next Ella experience is a visit to Gallery L at the Main Library.
"Portraits from the Golden Age of Jazz: Photographs by William Gottlieb" is up until March 18.
The exhibition of more than 70 images is a showcase of jazz artists, taken by Gottlieb -- who died in April at age 89 -- during the 1930s and 1940s.
Lester "Prez" Young and Frank Sinatra are there, as well as the familiar Billie Holiday in an unfamiliar pose, smiling and having fun with her dog, Mister.
The 1947 photo of Ella is part portrait, part theater. Her eyes-closed vocalizing has entranced Dizzy Gillespie, to the seeming dismay of bassist Ray Brown, who would become her husband.
The Afro-American Cultural Center is showing two jazz exhibitions through April 29.
One features the art of Essud Fungcap, a Haitian-Chinese artist.
The other, "JazzArt: Artistically Alive," contains life-size images of Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and, of course, Ella Fitzgerald. In the acrylic on canvas painting by Zoe Alowan, Ella -- right hand raised -- is dressed in red.
This young Ella is so different from the jazz artist I saw in concert in the 1970s with Count Basie and the pianist Oscar Peterson. By that time she was older and sick. She wore thick glasses because of eyes weakened by diabetes.
She had to sit. Then she sang, and the years melted away. The voice was strong, the scatting impeccable.
A life with illness and heartbreak, yet you never heard the pain.
IN MY OPINION Mary C.
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