Ella in Berlin: Mack the Knife

On 21 November 1934, at seventeen, she went on stage at the Apollo Theater’s Amateur Night, meaning to dance, and sang instead. She won. In 1935 the drummer and bandleader Chick Webb took her into his orchestra, and at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem she sang for the dancers. In 1938 her own version of a children’s rhyme, A-Tisket, A-Tasket, made her and the band famous.

When Webb died in 1939 she led the orchestra for three years. In the 1940s, singing with Dizzy Gillespie’s band and on the tours of the producer Norman Granz, she made scat singing her own: she sang what she heard the horns play, and made up the words as she went.

In the mid-1950s Granz started Verve Records around her, and she began the Song Books, an album for each great American songwriter, Cole Porter first, then Rodgers and Hart, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin and the Gershwins. In Berlin in 1960 she forgot the words to Mack the Knife and made up new ones on the spot; the record won her two Grammys. She won thirteen in all, and in 1993 set up a foundation for music education and for children in need. She died in Beverly Hills on 15 June 1996.

This is a demo site, a tribute built to show a TJP site for a singer who teaches: workshops, family shows and a private pack for schools. Its dates are the demo’s own.