The Last Page

After Ella Fitzgerald died last June, I picked out a few CDs, played them over and over, and became happier and happier at what I heard (except in the case of a horrible album with Andre Previn on piano, and a few cuts of the Cole Porter songbook, funereally arranged); and the happier I was, the more perplexed I felt about the state of American music. For the arts follow a very strange history, now up into greatness, now down, in no visible relation to the ups and downs of any other kind of history. Who can doubt, upon learning that Ella Fitzgerald has died, which way the musical arts in America have been going?

Ella was a singer’s singer, which is not an altogether good thing. She was the jazz equivalent of a great opera so...