Quotes About Ella Fitzgerald

When I was 3 or 4, I seemed to be bursting with music. They played Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra in the house, so I learned my vocabulary from song lyrics - I was literally singing before I was talking.

Ultimately, I'd say a lot of my vocal influences are jazz-based, people like Ella Fitzgerald, or Fred Astaire.

One of my biggest musical influences is definitely Ella Fitzgerald as a vocalist.

When we were at the Apollo, Holiday was a block away. I asked her for her autograph.

Popular music is one endless love song that, I suspect, the basically solitary Ella Fitzgerald approached much as the basically solitary Marianne Moore approached poetry: reading it with a certain contempt for it, Moore said, you could find a place in it for the genuine.

I've always sung. I was really into musical theater when I was growing up. As a kid, I listened to Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone, actually, on cassette tapes.

I'm comfortable singing jazz. The only thing I was concerned about is that everybody, even in jazz, has their own style. To me, the queen of doodling was Ella Fitzgerald, and scatting is something I never thought I could do.

The window in which it's acceptable to listen to Ella Fitzgerald's 1960 record 'Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas' is short, so I keep it in heavy rotation throughout the festive season.

I'm in love with the way that Ella Fitzgerald delivered a lyric. She would deliver a lyric with the kind of clarity that would make you wonder why it was written, and make you think about the writer. I think every writer hopes an Ella of any genre or anytime gets a hold of their work and works the song like that.

You may be wondering: Could Ella Fitzgerald explode your liver? She could not.

I would say my greatest musical influences have been Ella Fitzgerald and Mary J. Blige.

No one in the world can beat Ella Fitzgerald as a riff singer.

The best vocalists I can think of are female. There is no singer I can think of who can touch Ella Fitzgerald. And when Billie Holiday sings, she's merciless about it. Her voice has just this immaculate sadness - even in happy songs, there was something that was so broken about it.

My style of singing has always been referred to 'soul' singing when it fact it's more influenced by English R&B Blues Shouting. I'm closer to Led Zeppelin as a vocalist than to Ella Fitzgerald. It was torture dealing with major labels.

You know, we were outdoorsy types, my folks, and one of the first tapes I got, a friend gave me a cassette tape of Ella Fitzgerald singing with the Count Basie orchestra. And it was the first time, really, that someone's voice had really spoken to me, and it was just so pure.

I was living in New York. Sometimes, our gang of musicians would go to Louis Armstrong's home and play records. It was a lesson, like going to school at night. Ella Fitzgerald was an inspiration, too, a unique artist. When you had an opportunity to be with people like them, you cherished it.

My background was always more soulful pop. I was named after Ella Fitzgerald, and when I was a kid, I was listening to Lauryn Hill, Etta James, Joss Stone. For me, it was always about the voice.

I was into all sorts of music as a kid. I was very curious about ethnic music and different styles. I loved Django Reinhardt. I loved Ella Fitzgerald. I was also influenced by all the crooners of the day, like Johnny Ray, Frankie Lane.