Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996)

 Ella Fitzgerald, known as the "First Lady of Song" and "Lady Ella," was an immensely popular American jazz and song vocalist who interpreted much of the Great American Songbook.

Ella Fitzgerald turned to singing after a troubled childhood and debuted at the Apollo Theater in 1934. Discovered in an amateur contest, she went on to become the top female jazz singer for decades. In 1958, Fitzgerald made history as the first African American woman to win a Grammy Award. Due in no small part to her vocal quality, with lucid intonation and a broad range, the singer would go on to win 13 Grammys in total and sell more than 40 million albums. Her multi-volume "songbooks" on Verve Records are among America's recording treasures.

Jazz vocalist Sarah Vaughan performed with big bands before becoming a solo artist. She is known for singing "Send in the Clowns" and "Broken-Hearted Melody."

Jazz singer Sarah Vaughan grew up with a love of music and performing. Winning a talent competition held at Harlem's Apollo Theater launched her singing career. She worked with bandleaders Earl Hines and Billy Eckstine before becoming a successful solo performer who commingled pop and jazz. At age 66, Vaughan died in Hidden Hills, California, on April 3, 1990.

 Frank Sinatra was one of the most popular entertainers of the 20th century, forging a career as an award-winning singer and film actor.

Singer and actor Frank Sinatra rose to fame singing big band numbers. In the 1940s and 1950s, he had a dazzling array of hit songs and albums and went on to appear in dozens of films, winning a supporting actor Oscar for his role in From Here to Eternity. He left behind a massive catalog of work that includes iconic tunes like "Love and Marriage," "Strangers in the Night," "My Way" and "New York, New York." He died on May 14, 1998, in Los Angeles, California. 

Tender and warm with a ballad, Carmen McRae was one of the great singers of jazz, finding the depth of feeling in the lyrics of the songs she interpreted. An accomplished pianist who in her early career accompanied herself, she occasionally returned to the piano later in her career.

McRae learned piano through private lessons and was discovered by Irene Wilson Kitchings, a musician and former wife of pianist Teddy Wilson. McRae sang with the Benny Carter, Count Basie and Mercer Ellington big bands during the 1940s and made her recorded debut as Carmen Clarke while the wife of drummer Kenny Clarke. During the bebop revolution at Minton's Playhouse, McRae was an intermission pianist. At the Playhouse is likely where she first heard Thelonious Monk's music, which influenced her piano playing and musical sense. In the early 1950s, she worked with the Mat Mathews Quintet. She signed her first significant recording contract with Decca in 1954.

 Anita O'Day is a singer's singer. Highly rhythmic with a distinctive sense of phrasing, she was one of the first big band singers to tackle the intricacies of bebop and prevail. She's influenced many, including June Christy and Chris Connor, and now stands as a living legend. 

Born Anita Belle Colton in Chicago, Illinois on October 18, 1919, O'Day grew up in a broken home. She took the first chance to leave home when, at age 14, she became a contestant in the popular Walk-a-thons as a dancer. She toured with the Walk-a-thons circuits for two years, occasionally being called upon to sing.

Anita returned to Chicago, and landed her first legit singing gig at Chicago's Planet Mars. Carl Cons, the editor of Down Beat magazine at the time, caught her performance and was so enthralled that he hired her to open his new jazz club, The Off-Beat.

Mel Tormé was the consummate entertainer: As a drummer, singer, composer, arranger, lyricist, writer and actor, his career spanned nearly the entire 20th century. Blessed with impeccable timing and a smooth, mellow timbre, Tormé was known during his heyday as "The Velvet Fog." 

The son of Russian immigrants, Melvin Howard Tormé was born in Chicago, Illinois, on September 13, 1925, and grew up on the city's south side. In 1929, at the age of four, he began his singing career with the Coon-Sanders Orchestra, which led to a role on the popular radio program, "Jack Armstrong, The All-American Boy."

In high school, Mel's attention had turned to jazz, particularly the music of Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and Artie Shaw. He played drums and piano and also began to explore his lyrical skills. One of the tunes he penned at this time, "Lament to Love," was recorded by Harry James and played on The Hit Parade.

Mel's first real break came when the Marx Brothers hired him to play drums in their backing band. After he moved with his family to Los Angeles, he joined a band called "The School-Kids." They soon changed their name to "The Mel-tones," and Tormé became the group's lead singer and arranger.

Arguably the most adventurous female jazz singer of all time, Betty Carter was an idiosyncratic stylist and a restless improviser who pushed the limits of melody and harmony as much as any bebop horn player. The husky-voiced Carter was capable of radical, off-the-cuff reworkings of whatever she sang, abruptly changing tempos and dynamics, or rearranging the lyrics into distinctive, off-the-beat rhythmic patterns. She could solo for 20 minutes, scat at lightning speed, or drive home an emotion with wordless, bluesy moans and sighs. She wasn't quite avant-garde, but she was definitely "out." Yet as much as Carter was fascinated by pure, abstract sound, she was also a sensitive lyric interpreter when she chose, a tender and sensual ballad singer sometimes given to suggestive asides. Her wild unpredictability kept her marginalized for much of her career, and she never achieved the renown of peers like Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, or Carmen McRae. What was more, her exacting musical standards and assertive independence limited her recorded output somewhat. But Carter stuck around long enough to receive her proper due; her unwillingness to compromise eventually earned her the respect of the wider jazz audience, and many critics regarded her as perhaps the purest jazz singer active in the '80s and '90s. Additionally, Carter took an active role in developing new talent, and was a tireless advocate for the music and the freedom she found in it, right up to her death in 1998.

Shirley Horn began leading her own group in the mid-1950s, and in 1960 recorded her first album, Embers and Ashes, which established her reputation as an exceptional and sensitive jazz vocalist. Born in 1934 in Washington, DC, she studied classical piano as a teenager at Howard University's Junior School of Music.

Under the influence of artists such as Oscar Peterson and Ahmad Jamal, she then began a career as a jazz pianist and soon after discovered the great expressive power of her voice. When Miles Davis heard Embers and Ashes, he brought her to New York, where she began opening for him at the Village Vanguard. Soon she was performing in major venues throughout the United States and recording with Quincy Jones for the Mercury label.

For some years she spent much of her time in Europe, then took a ten-year hiatus to raise her family in Washington. She continued to appear in and around the DC area, and in the 1980s she returned to the recording studio. The overwhelming critical success of her 1981 appearance at Holland's North Sea Jazz Festival reintroduced revitalized her career, allowing her to take to the road with her trio and record more albums.

Her association with the Verve label, which began in 1987, gave a new showcase to her inimitable style and cemented her reputation as a world-class jazz artist. Six of her more than 20 albums have been nominated for Grammy Awards, and she has collaborated with jazz artists including Hank Jones, Kenny Burrell, Wynton Marsalis, Roy Hargrove, Buck Hill, Branford Marsalis, and Toots Thielemans.

In 1990, she collaborated with Miles Davis on her critically acclaimed album You Won't Forget Me. Her 1992 recording Here's to Life was that year's top-selling jazz album and earned a Grammy Award for arranger Johnny Mandel. In 1998, Horn paid tribute to her mentor with the brilliant recording I Remember Miles, winning the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Performance. Health problems in the early 2000s forced her to cut back on her appearances.

Billie Holiday, birth name Elinore Harris, byname Lady Day, American jazz singer, one of the greatest from the 1930s to the ’50s.   Eleanora (her preferred spelling) Harris was the daughter of Clarence Holiday, a professional musician who for a time played guitar with the Fletcher Henderson band. She and her mother used her maternal grandfather’s surname, Fagan, for a time; then in 1920 her mother married a man surnamed Gough, and both she and Eleanora adopted his name. It is probable that in neither case did her mother have Eleanora’s name legally changed. The singer later adopted her natural father’s last name and took the name Billie from a favourite movie actress, Billie Dove. In 1928 she moved with her mother from Baltimore, Maryland (where she had spent her childhood), to New York City, and after three years of subsisting by various means, she found a job singing in a Harlem nightclub. She had had no formal musical training, but, with an instinctive sense of musical structure and with a wealth of experience gathered at the root level of jazz and blues, she developed a singing style that was deeply moving and individual.