Billie Holiday arriving at a preliminary court hearing in 1949. Source.

If I had to choose just one song by Billie Holiday (click here and here for my main tributes)… I couldn’t. You’re my thrill is a contender, as is Don’t explain, and Fine and mellow, filmed for TV in 1957, is just adorable—but I’m increasingly infatuated by Crazy he calls me:

Sentenced for possession of narcotics in 1947 (as she wrote, “It was called ‘The United States of America versus Billie Holiday’. And that’s just the way it felt”), Billie was released from prison in 1948; losing her New York City Cabaret Card prevented her from working anywhere that sold alcohol—but she soon came back with a show at Carnegie Hall. Meanwhile she had split with both her husband and her drug-dealing lover, but she was busted again in January 1949. She made the very first recording of Crazy he calls me (Carl Sigman, to lyrics by Bob Russell) in October that year—in the same Decca sessions as You’re my thrill.

Decca Studios, New York 1949.

Any jazz ballad invites rubato, but this song is a classic instance of Billie’s utter freedom from rhythmic parameters, going with the poetic flow; and just as astounding is her freedom in pitch, always bending the notes of the scale. No-one else can match this! With the modulation into the middle section (“Like the wind that shakes the bough…”), she’s just as irresistible. Like much of her repertoire, it could be quite saccharine, but her timbre in every phrase encapsulates joy and pain, at once intimate and detached—I can only resort to the cliché “bitter-sweet”. *

Many other singers went on to record the song (listen here), but not even Aretha’s version can compare. Still, I do have a lot of time for Patsy Cline’s Crazy (1961) (in my post on Country). My Playlist of songs includes not only Billie, Chet Baker, Michel Legrand, and the Beatles, but fado, taranta, Bach, Mahler, Ravel, and Barbara Hannigan…

* I could listen to Billie singing the opening lines all day long: “I say I’ll move the mountains, and I’ll move the mountains, if he wants them out of the way”. Many jazzers found it useful to study notation, but like many of the great musicians in the world, Billie never learned to read music. In most cases she would have been familiar with other versions of a song before she began reworking it, so for this new tune I imagine Carl Sigman or someone would have played it to her. Notation can be ridiculous (see here, scrolling down)—of course it’s only an approximation, but most scores of the opening read more or less like this:

Take me for a pint sometime and I’ll do my impression of Pavarotti singing it from the score… A few written versions attempt to convey basic syncopation, but they just look pedantic. Most jazzers found notation useful at some stage, and some latter-day sax or guitar players learn a lot from meticulous transcriptions of solos by Bird or Hendrix; but in simpler cases like this, far better just to listen…

BTW, those opening lines recall a dictum that has been attributed to Flann O’Brien, perhaps apocryphally: “I don’t like mountains, because they get in the way of the view”.