Both recorded for Decca and Ella's contract with the company was long and binding

Both recorded for Decca, and Ella's contract with the company was long and binding. Ella made her first record ("Love and Kisses") with Webb in 1935. Most famous among her many hits with the Webb band was "A-Tisket A-Tasket, My Little Yellow Basket", a child's novelty song recorded in 1938.By the time Webb died in 1939 Ella had made such a name for herself with both the public and her fellow musicians that she was able to take over the band and lead it for the next two years. But such was her drawing power that she decided to work as a solo artist and began appearing in cabaret and in theatres. Decca made the most of their contract and her jazz versions of numbers like "Lady Be Good" and "Flying Home" reinforced her international reputation.Her marriage to the great jazz bassist Ray Brown lasted from 1948 to 1952. In 1948, Brown was a member of Granz's JATP unit and Ella turned up at one of the concerts to see him. She was spotted in the audience, and somebody asked her to sing on stage Granz grudgingly agreed to let her.

Ella sang so well that, in the vernacular, she knocked everybody out, including Granz who offered her a contract on the spot.She stayed with him for the rest of her career and their relationship was so good that no further contracts were necessary But the contract with Decca still had years to run. Granz wanted Ella to record for his own Verve label, but try as he might he could not release her from the Decca agreement. For several years he had to cut out all her contributions from his series of JATP concert albums, and it was not until 1955 that she was finally able to leave Decca and sing for Verve.Granz became her personal manager, although he lived most of the time in Switzerland. Every time she was to record he would fly to the United States to manage the sessions. But the two had their disagreements, as was natural in such a long relationship."I remember one time in Milan," Granz said, "she wouldn't sing `April In Paris', even though it was her big record of the time: she let the audience shout her into `Lady Be Good' instead. When she came offstage she yelled at me, and I yelled louder at her, and we didn't speak to one another for three days. Some night I may tell her to do six songs, but she feels good and goes out there and stays on for an hour and a half.

It's part of her whole approach to life - the desire to sing and please people by singing."In 1955 Ella and Peggy Lee appeared in the gangster film Pete Kelly's Blues where the emphasis was laid more on the singing than on the shooting This was a marvellous platform for the two singers. Ella also had a role in the film Let No Man Write My Epitaph (1960).One of Granz's few failures in music was his handling of Duke Ellington when Duke and his band were under contract to him at periods during the Fifties and Sixties It seems the two men did not get on well. Despite the fact that the band was at one of its musical peaks, Duke's work for Granz, although good, was comparatively unsuccessful. Shortly after it had recorded the inspired Shakespearian suite "Such Sweet Thunder" for Columbia in 1957, Granz teamed the Ellington orchestra with Ella Fitzgerald to record the Duke Ellington Song Book albums.