Wow! Thanks so much to those of you who have already signed up for our Rip it Up club! I’m thrilled to be sharing this project with you, and to have this opportunity to celebrate some of my favourite music and musicians! There’ll be a lot of creative fun in coming weeks (we’ll be kicking things off this coming Friday, so there’s not too long to wait). Joining the Rip it Up club has many benefits, including exclusive early access to every pattern in the collection, the 10% club discount (valid on any purchase in the KDD shop), and the always-lively and supportive club KAL hosted in our Ravelry group. Knitters often tell us how much they enjoy the camaraderie and anticipation of our clubs, and find the patterns and essays bring them a weekly lift through what can often be a dreich time of year. The club price includes a printed book (shipped to any address worldwide) and a digital-only option is available too. You’ll find all the other practical information about the club, together with a few hints about the Rip it Up collection, over on the club sign-up page, and if you can’t find an answer there to any questions you may have, feel free to tell me so in the comments. I’m afraid I can’t say much more about the patterns, as that would spoil the surprise, but I can perhaps mention that as well as a pullover I can’t quite believe I knitted, this collection also includes what might be my favourite hat design of all time: a hat whose geometry I find so satisfying that I’ve already knitted 5 versions (a sixth may well be in the offing, if I find the time)
If you’ve not been a member of our previous clubs, you might not know what to expect from my essays, so I thought I’d share a previously published piece with you today, which first appeared in my 2019 book Wheesht. This book explores many different aspects of creativity and the creative process, and it includes several essays about music and musicians, including Alice Coltrane, Evelyn Glennie . . . and the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald.
I suggest listening to the performance (linked from youtube below), then read the essay.
How High the Moon – from Wheesht
When Ella Fitzgerald stepped out onto the stage of Berlin’s Deutschlandhalle on February 13th, 1960 and began to sing How High the Moon, she knew exactly what she was doing. She knew what she was doing because she’d sung Nancy Hamilton and Morgan Lewis’s jazz standard countless times before. Since 1947, How High the Moon had remained a staple of her performative repertoire: an immensely popular and frequently recorded song with a familiar framework of chords, lyrics and harmonic progression that Ella knew completely and fully as a singer, inside and out. How High the Moon was Ella Fitzgerald’s creative frame, a musical structure within which she felt entirely comfortable and at ease. But, as she took a breath before the crowd of thousands that had gathered to hear her in the gigantic arena that had been built for the 1936 Olympics, before she launched into the opening bars of the simple, rising melody, she gave herself permission to mess up, taking a brave and playful step into the unknown. Rather than performing the familiar tune by rote, Ella improvised and messed it up, transforming the familiar song into the springboard of her own creativity in a remarkable extempore performance which surely remains one of the best recorded examples of an improvised scat vocal.
Ella’s performance opens with a swinging 32 bars, in which the lyric is sung straight, the melody embellished with a few easy turns and runs. Then the band picks things up, the tempo quickly shifts into a blistering bebop pace, and the audience is prepared for what’s to come with some familiar messed-up words (which Ella had often sung before): “we’re singing it because you asked for it / so we’re swinging it, just for you”. There then follows a section of confident instrumental musicality, in which she displays an extraordinary ability to use her voice as something very like a bebop horn, with the quick, unbridled lines and complex harmonies that characterised the adroit style of her contemporaries, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. “Bop musicians like Parker and Gillespie have stimulated me more than I can say”, Ella remarked in an interview with Ebony magazine—and she surely sings out that influence in this section, joyfully quoting several bars of Charlie Parker’s bebop classic, Ornithology.
Leaving Parker and his creative contrafacts behind, Ella continues to move effortlessly through several different musical styles, genres and locales. Apparent ease belies the complexity of the musical journey as we follow her voice—with its flawless intonation, impeccable phrasing and clear, harmonic subtlety—from the dance hall to the supper club; we float away with her south of the border in a flowing melodic minor section (shades of Tin Tin Deo or the Carioca), and we stand together with her to parodic military attention, as she transforms her voice into a bugle call and plays her vocal chords as if they were a comedic, rasping kazoo. Her extempore flights are punctuated by continual, knowing references to other familiar jazz themes and melodies, such as her own first famous self-composed number-one hit from 1938, A Tisket a Tasket.
“I think she brought scat to a new level of artistry,” said tenor man Sonny Rollins of her use of musical quotation. “The way Ella uses interpolations of different songs into different parts of the melodies is really high art. It’s one thing to put a melody of one song into another for effect, so the crowd likes it, but there’s also an artistic level involved with these excursions.” In this 1960 recording of How High the Moon, there’s an impressively mischievous, self-referential element to these artistic interpolations too—for, as Ella quotes jazz standards Stormy Weather, Havin’ a Heatwave and Smoke Gets in Your Eyes (sung as “sweat gets in your eyes”) through the latter parts of the improvisation, she impishly acknowledges the physical demands on her body of the performance while remaining in the midst of the performance itself. In this remarkable improvisatory excursion, she’s somehow able to absorb herself fully in the music—to be the music, to be in the music—and to reflect on the music simultaneously.
It was the sheer musical agility of her improvisations that Ella’s friends and contemporaries found so very impressive. “Anyone who attempts to sing extemporaneously will tell you that the hardest aspect of that kind of singing is to stay in tune,” said her good friend, Mel Tormé. “You are wandering all over the scales, the notes coming out of your mouth a millisecond after you think of them … a singer has to work doubly hard to emit those random notes … with perfect intonation … her notes float out in perfect pitch, effortless, and most important of all, swinging.” To describe Ella Fitzgerald’s singing as effortless or easy might perhaps suggest a certain technical coldness, but I find most striking about her improvisational style is its deeply emotive and continually playful nature. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about her 1960 performance of How High the Moon is, then, the completeness of its musical elation: the sheer infectious joy of someone who is so utterly immersed in the pleasure of what they do. “I guess I’d better quit while I’m ahead,” a near-exhausted Ella sings, then continues to riff away for another couple of happy minutes before bringing the house down.
Every time I listen to this performance—and I have listened to it many times—I find it deeply moving. Perhaps this is because I know, in my own small way, what it is to feel the joy of improvising or messing up, and how that playful feeling can somehow capture just what it means to be alive. Perhaps I find it moving because I know that this kind of apparently effortless creativity isn’t easy at all: that, on the contrary, it arises from within a framework of skills that have been tirelessly acquired over many years; and that in this instance it is the result of Ella’s carefully-honed musical expertise and her complete dedication to her craft. And perhaps I find the performance moving because I know that Ella Fitzgerald found her particular place of improvisatory joy in a world of truly messed-up prejudice. Singing her way through segregation-era America, she faced not only overt injustice at the hands of police and public authorities—the institutionalised racism of the white musical establishment; the discriminatory behaviour of companies and sponsors like Pan Am and Bell Telephone—but also daily, continuous, casual racial bias to which was added (in the overwhelmingly masculine world of American jazz) the further complications of her gender, weight and physical appearance (“Tell slender Ella to leave me alone / I’m not too hot, but my shape is my own”, she defiantly sang earlier that same February evening in Berlin in her own fabulously messed-up version of The Lady is a Tramp). Yet, against all she faced, from 1934 until the mid-1990s, Ella Fitzgerald continuously and creatively messed up her messed-up world with the power of her own musical play. She reached higher than the moon by singing with courage and determination, with sheer delight, with infectious joy, and always without fear.
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