English Wordplay ~ Listen and Enjoy
ELLA FITZGERALD 1919-1996
It was the essence of the energy conveyed from the depth of my soul that was the only important thing
"Lady Ella" was one of the most influential jazz vocalists of the 20th century. With a vocal range spanning three octaves, she was noted for her purity of tone, phrasing and intonation, and a "horn-like" improvisational ability, particularly in her scat singing. Over a recording career that lasted 59 years, she was the winner of 13 Grammy Awards.
In her youth, she wanted to be a dancer, although she loved listening to jazz recordings by Louis Armstrong.
When she was 15, her mother died in a car crash. She started skipping school. She worked as a lookout at a bordello and as a runner for a gambling outfit.
| PETER | Where did you get your musical talent from? |
| FITZGERALD | Music is what I am as a soul. It is form of communication that started with the individualization of energy, the breaking off of souls from the Source. When I came down in human form, my lives were not only to continue developing musical vibrations, but also to work on languages; so that people would understand one another. It began with the earliest grunts of humans who hadn't yet evolved vocal chords, to developing languages, and finally to communicating through music. |
| PETER | Were you one of the early souls to break off from Source? |
| FITZGERALD | Yes. The Source can only experience a finite number of things, even though it is infinite. So it broke off parts of itself, and I am part of that Source to enlarge experience. |
Toni comments: When she talked of the essence of the soul coming down, it was like a massive cloud of energy and one little atom breaking off from it, but still connected to the Source and responding to energy within the mass. It was quite mind-boggling - there was so much going on at once.
| PETER | At 18 you entered a talent contest as a dancer, but at the last moment switched to singing; and you won the first prize. |
| FITZGERALD | My guides (a little voice) said, "Sing! Sing and reach them with the feelings that you have inside of you." I won as much for being able to touch their souls, as I did for the not-so-great technique I had! |
| PETER | Your first recording Love and Kisses was a hit. |
| FITZGERALD | It was awesome. Beyond anything a poor street waif could imagine. I knew that the way to reach the millions was via the "platter" as they called records then. I had this sense of an immense beginning |
| PETER | Tell us about your relationship with Satchmo (Louis Armstrong). |
| FITZGERALD | A soul mate of mine. We were perfecting a dialect of vibration that would reach into a particular group of embedded souls. By "embedded", I mean souls that are so deeply into the phyical experience that they have no connection with their essences as souls. |
| PETER | Did you feel your private love life didn't match the romance you sang about? |
| FITZGERALD | On the physical level, it never did. It is impossible to match the unconditional love of the soul. |
| PETER | At the end of your life you had diabetes and you had both your legs amputated. What is the point of such deliberate suffering? |
| FITZGERALD | You do not know how grand unconditional love is until the taste of the negative, the opposite. Each moment spent in despair, magnified my feeling of what I possesed, when I returned to my true essence. |
Toni comments: There was a great deal of visual communication that came to me with everything that Ella said. It was if I were simultaneously in two dimensions. She was describing the physical, but also giving me examples of the realm she in now.
So when she talked of breaking through crowds and the like, I saw a snowplough cutting through deep drifts, and then an ice-breaker breaking up huge chunks of ice.
For me, this may well have been a meeting with one of the oldest souls, I've encountered, while I've been in phyical form.
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