Ella Fitzgerald - 'C Jam Blues'

'Have mercy. The Queen.' 'The best of the best.' The commentators are probably not wrong. Here is the 'First Lady of Song', as she was known, in session with some big-hitting special guests to supplement her regular backing band. She looks and sounds – initially at least, while introducing Eddie 'Lockjaw' Davis and Roy 'Little Jazz' Eldridge – like a kindly primary school teacher. She certainly confounds that impression, though, once she starts scatting her way through Duke Ellington's 'C Jam Blues'. There are scat singers and there are scat singers, and you only have to listen to some of the also-rans to appreciate just how incredibly fluent and inventive Ella Fitzgerald was.

There's no shortage of great live videos featuring Miss Ella in illustrious company – with the Count Basie Band, for example, at Montreux in 1979 and Duke Ellington in 1966, where she trades licks with Paul Gonsalves on Ben Webster's old showcase, 'Cottontail' – but, for all the razzmatazz, I had more or less plumped for a wonderful intimate duet with guitarist Joe Pass on Antonio Carlos Jobim's 'One Note Samba'. It seemed to illustrate just what's possible even in such a minimal context when you have someone of Ella's ability to transform something essentially very simple into something multi-layered and somewhat extraordinary. Her Ella Abraça Jobim double album of 1980, by the way, might appear to be an afterthought to the celebrated songbooks she recorded during her heyday, but it's well worth investigating.

I had plumped for the duet – until I stumbled upon this particular gem. I don't know where or when it takes place, but it's probably somewhere in Holland given the subtitles and the accent of the charming man who presents our diva with a single red rose at the end of her performance, and sometime during Tommy Flanagan's lengthy occupation of the piano seat. Sometime, too, when Ella's myopia did not yet require milk-bottle bottoms for lenses nor frames the size of Dennis Taylor's when he won the world snooker championship in 1985. Since she was with bass player Keter Betts and drummer Bobby Durham in London in 1974, let's settle for that year.

Roy Eldridge's glasses by contrast are rather snazzy for an old'un. I wouldn't say no. He, 'Lockjaw' and Ella were all by this time in their twilight of their great careers, but they blow up a storm and enjoy themselves so much in the process that you can't help but smile from start to finish. They start off in unison before Ella launches into one of her scat excursions that's pitch-perfect and right on the money as ever. Then 'Jaws' gets his turn after three and a half minutes, the swingin' tenor man whose gruff, tough Texan tone detonated the mushroom cloud on The Atomic Mr. Basie. 'Go Eddie!' the school mistress urges before she re-enters the fray to do battle in the way that Johnny Griffin did with him in the early Sixties. Then it's Roy Eldridge's turn at five and a half minutes, the trumpeter who bridged the swing and bebop eras. You can clearly hear during his solo how and why he influenced Dizzy Gillespie in particular. By now, things are simmering nicely and the interchange between Ella and 'Little Jazz' is delightful: I love the way that the trumpeter tries and fails to keep up and cracks up before 'Jaws' picks up the pieces. There's still time for Ella to throw in a quote from Lester Young's 'Jumpin' With Symphony Sid' just after eight minutes – and probably a few more besides – in a bravura climax that leaves no doubt about what an amazing performer she was. As the man with the rose says, 'Thank you vay much.'

With so much going on out front, there's not much room given to her regular band. We see Bobby Durham towards the end pounding away on the drums. He worked with Ella for more than a decade during her long tenure with her perennial champion Norman Granz's Pablo label. Keter Betts on bass was with her for even longer: from 1971 until her final live performances in the early Nineties. One of those shadowy sidemen who often get forgotten, he accompanied Charlie Byrd on the guitarist's ground-breaking One Note Samba, thus playing a seminal role in bringing bossa nova to the rest of the world. It's often forgotten that Detroit-born Tommy Flanagan, the 'jazz poet' with the delicate touch and subtle sense of swing, was the accompanist who pushed John Coltrane to the harmonic limits on the dazzling 'Giant Steps'. Finally, Joe Pass, the guitarist who seemed to pop up on every Pablo session at one point, is seen and heard strumming chords rather than coolly picking notes as he does on 'One Note Samba'. Like Bill Evans, he exuded such a modest and respectable aura (although he bears a passing resemblance to the John Cazale character in The Godfather) that it's hard to square the fact of heroin addiction. Pass talked of 'living in the dark corners of society' during his years as an addict in the Fifties, five of which he spent in a Texas prison. In 1960, he signed himself into the Synanon Foundation, a Californian drug therapy clinic, in an attempt to kick the habit. It took him three years, during which time he recorded a worthy album with other patients, Sounds Of Synanon, but he walked out of there a clean man.

Ella never had to go through that kind of stuff. Not that she had it easy: her childhood went off the rails when her mother died, and her stepfather certainly ill-treated her and quite possibly abused her. She spent time in an orphanage and a reformatory school, and got involved in the infamous numbers racket. But her wonderful voice saved her from ruin. After winning an Amateur Night at the Apollo theatre in Harlem, she came to the attention of Chick Webb, the miniature hunchback drummer behind the outsized drum kit, whose orchestra regularly blew the opposition off the stage of the Savoy ballroom. Webb hired her as the band's frontline vocalist and became Ella's legal guardian. She in turn gave him his biggest career smash with her childlike ditty, 'A-Tisket, A-Tasket'. Despite losing her 'little yellow basket' and then Webb himself (to spinal tuberculosis), Ella took over the band and the rest, as they say...

Later in life, though, worn out by endless tours and live shows, she was plagued by health problems that culminated in a brutal double amputation of her lower legs due to complications linked to diabetes. For all the accolades and 40 million plus albums sold and countless celebrated performances in concert and on TV, there was always the impression that underneath that genial exterior lurked a slightly sad soul, unhappy in love and undermined by constant racial discrimination, direct and subliminal. Gestures like that proffered Dutch rose must have helped, but only temporarily. Nevertheless, she kept on scatting and smiling. 'I used to wish I was pretty,' she once said. 'My cousin Georgia always taught me that if you smile, people will like you.' Millions certainly did.