A century of jazz has produced many great singers. Few have ever represented or defined the genre quite like Ella Fitzgerald, often called the “First Lady of Song” and “Lady Ella” during her long and successful career. She sang like a morning songbird. Her tone and pitch on every memorable track were perfect. Her stage presence and ability to captivate an entire room had few equals.

Judith Tick’s Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song is a masterly examination of the virtuosa’s life and career and the first major biography written about Fitzgerald since she died in 1996. Tick, an author and professor emerita of music history at Boston’s Northeastern University, is an expert in American music and women’s history in music. Fitzgerald is deservingly placed on the mountaintop because “she treated jazz as process, not confined to this idiom or that genre. And through her own transformative quests as an artist, she changed the trajectory of American vocal jazz in this century.”