The Stool Pigeon

You want these documentaries about musicians who had huge lives to help fill in the gaps; to tell you exactly what it was you hear in their songs; for it to no longer be something abstract. Or perhaps you don’t, in which case you shouldn’t watch them.

This one on Ella Fitzgerald, part of a BBC4 series predictably called Legends, did a half-decent job. The lady died in 1996 (appallingly with the bottom halves of both her legs amputated because of complications with diabetes), so she wasn’t around to help out with the discourse, and she was never the kind of woman to reveal much about her past anyway. There’s no footage of her on talk shows, which immediately seems strange (she must have done loads), and no filmed interviews from back in the day; just a few audio clips which are played over generic shots of, say, Harlem in the thirties, where she’d moved to with her mum as a child.

The scoop in this hour-long film is, in fact, someone else’s scoop: by accident, a newspaper journalist recently found out that, after Ella’s mother died when she was 15 (pops was never around), she went a bit loony, flirted with crime, and got sent upstate to an institution that’s now a men’s prison. It wasn’t that she denied this interesting period in her life, the talking heads reveal, it was more that she didn’t own up to it. We’ve always known, though, that she was essentially a street kid before she was recruited out of the blue by bandleader Chick Webb, aged 17, and there’s no doubt that she learnt self-reliance and became vastly ambitious exactly because there was once a time when she had absolutely nothing.

The talking heads here range from the Brit jazz pack - Cullum, David McAlmont and Guardian writer John Fordham - but the better stuff comes from her old band members, managers and friends, who still seem to be finding out about Ella and still only seem capable of speculating about whether her severe teenage years informed the way she sung those songs. Maybe that’s best. What they do know for sure, however, is fascinating: that she was riddled with insecurities, even when she was the biggest jazz star on the planet behind, or perhaps beside, Louis Armstrong, and that she was never capable of holding down a meaningful relationship with a man. She liked the bad boys, who always stitched her up, and she was eternally something of a girly woman.

Other remarkable things: during segregation, she would demand her audiences be mixed and her request was constantly granted. And for years and years she discreetly used her royalties to fund projects for under-privileged children.

So, not too bad a doc - could have been less, um, BBC, but ultimately you watch these things because you love the subject’s music and there’s loads of amazing performances scattered throughout the film. The most poignant is right at the end - when she’s old and singing a ballad with some bald white guy on an electric guitar. My god, that straight kills you.

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