Stephanie Stein Crease

Stephanie Stein Crease is a jazz historian, author, editor, and former Senior Jazz Coordinator for the Jazz Arts Program, Manhattan School of Music. Her books include Gil Evans: Out of the Cool (ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award), and Duke Ellington: His Life in Jazz, and, most recently, Rhythm Man: Chick Webb and the Beat that Changed America. She was literary editor for the Grammy-awarded Duke Ellington Centennial Edition. She was a 2020 Scholar-in Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NYPL, and 2018 Berger-Benny Carter-Berger Research Fellow at the Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University.

Music

Ella Fitzgerald’s auspicious debut on the national jazz scene with drummer/bandleader Chick Webb

Stephanie Stein Crease

The story of Ella Fitzgerald’s remarkable debut, told in an excerpt from Stephanie Stein Crease’s “Rhythm Man: Chick Webb and the Beat That Changed America.”