Who doesn’t love jazz music?
Jazz is one of the most soothing genres of music and has been leaving people in awe since it started way back in the late 1800s. The beautiful form of music started in the African-American communities of New Orleans and has been serenading people ever since.
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Ella Fitzgerald was sometime’s referred to as the”Queen of Jazz,” and performances like this one show exactly why.
The Queen of Jazz made her claim to fame with the Chick Webb band, before leaving the band behind in 1942 to start her illustrious career. Among many other awards, Fitzgerald won a whopping 14 Grammy awards for her incredible music in her lifetime.
In this rare footage, Fitzgerald performs “One Note Samba” live in 1969 with Ed Thigpen on the drums, Frank de la Rosa on the bass and Tommy Flanagan on the piano.
At the start of the performance, Fitzgerald cracks a joke with Flanagan, before beginning some impressive scat singing.
Fitzgerald rapidly sings a mixture of words and sounds before letting her gorgeous voice soar.
Scat singing is:
“singing in which the singer substitutes improvised nonsense syllables for the words of a song, and tries to sound and phrase like a musical instrument.”
The Queen of Jazz is one of the best when it comes to scatting.
It’s almost like beatboxing before beatboxing was even a thing. You could hear a pin drop at the Casino de Montreux, in Montreux, Switzerland.
Throughout the entire performance, Fitzgerald takes brief pauses from scat to showcase her electrifying vocals.
She maneuvers her way through any and every sound you can think of, as she stuns the tuned-in audience with her ability to improvise the sounds and words into the form of a song.
The crowd can’t help but break out with bursts of applause for her!
Like a true performer, she just keeps her foot on the pedal the whole time.
The video of this performance is over six and a half minutes long, and toward the end, she goes off taking the show to another level.
The last minute of the performance is filled with a mixture of scat and mesmerizing vocals that makes it hard not to be flabbergasted.
The Queen of Jazz is a natural-born-performer, wiping sweat from her forward with a rag as she pushes her abilities to the max.
Fitzgerald gave breathtaking performances like this all the way up until the end of her life.
Her talent continued all the way her last live performance in 1993 just three years before she sadly passed away after close to 60 years as a performer.
This concert was put on in a time far before social media existed, but that didn’t stop it from going viral on YouTube.
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Since it was posted on YouTube, Fitzgerald’s scat performance has been viewed over 7.7 million times.
Not only did her amazing performance get millions of views, but 51,000 people also liked it and almost 2,000 people left comments of admiration for the late jazz great. Many of her old live shows have been posted to YouTube with the same kind of results.
That includes an outstanding performance on The Ed Sullivan Show with another jazz legend, Duke Ellington.
Performers like this only come around once in a lifetime, and when they do, it’s something that history will always remember.
No matter who you are, or what kind of music you prefer, it’s impossible not to respect the Queen of Jazz for her epic talent.
To see the entire scat performance for yourself, just watch the video below!
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