Always spellbound by the 1957 TV appearance of the astounding Billie Holiday, I assembled an essential selection in tribute to her some years ago (as well as a separate post for Crazy)—but I never stop listening to her music, and the tracks below are no less essential!

While I’ve accumulated something of a library on her life and work, I’ve only just got round to reading a smattering of the vast literature—not exactly that I think it’s enough to “let the songs speak for themselves”, more that it’s become such a huge industry. Such books include

• Donald Clarke, Wishing on the moon (1994)
• Leslie Gourse (ed.), The Billie Holiday companion: seven decades of commentary (1997)
• Farah Jasmine Griffin, In search of Billie Holiday: if you can’t be free, be a mystery (2001), an astute study with the benefits of a black woman’s perspective, unpacking “how we know what we think we know” about her—referring to sources such as Angela Davis, Blues legacies and black feminism
• John Szwed*, Billie Holiday: the musician and the myth (2015) (review), which I’ll cite below
• and of course the “autobiography” Lady sings the blues (1956), ghost-written by William Dufty (well covered by Griffin, pp.45–55, and in Szwed’s first two chapters; cf. this LRB review).
  The 1972 biopic (watch here), with Diana Ross as Billie, is even more fictitious; though much criticised, it’s all part of the myth-making (e.g. Szwed, pp.83–94, and wise words from Griffin, pp.56–64).

Billie is just as popular a subject on film. The BBC documentary The long night of Lady Day (John Jeremy, 1984) is highly regarded—although Griffin rightly balks at the entitled white male pundits, still controlling her (and yes, now I’m getting in on the act too…):

I can only apologise for adding to the endless attempts to encapsulate Billie’s genius—but at least there’s lots of great music coming up.

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John Szwed writes:

Given her acknowledged stature as a musician, it is odd that many of the books on Holiday have only secondary interest in her music. But then again, maybe not so odd: music writing today is increasingly focused on lifestyles, as if the events of artists’ lives are enough to explain their music, and the songs they record are treated primarily as documents in support of a given biographer’s argument. […]
Most biographers look for those moments in an individual’s life that unlock its secrets or at least sum it up, then weave a narrative that focuses on these moments and ignores or downplays those that don’t support their analysis. […]

My intention was not to deny or gainsay the tribulations and tragedy of her life, but to shift the focus to her art. The consistency and taste she brought to nearly every performance, even those when her body was failing her, display a discipline, an artist’s complete devotion to her work, and a refusal to surrender to the demands of an insatiable world.

Billie’s voice, dreamy but never sentimental, had a unique blend of vulnerability and toughness. Once the microphone became more widely available in 1933, Billie adapted to a more intimate way of using her voice. Her tempi (like those of jazz generally) were partly a function of context—recording, or live; and if the latter, then the position of the song in the programme, and her mood on the night, influenced by that of the audience. Still, even in her early years listeners found her slow tempi a challenge, and as she grew older she tended to sing more slowly, more innig, dwelling on the pain.

Some features of her distinctive style (which among her many imitators can sound like mannerisms):

• The way she combined speech and song (far from the contrived sprechstimme of art music—see also Szwed, pp.161–3), bending notes, with pitches often indeterminate; **
• Her timing—rhythms lagging behind the beat or just outside it (Szwed pp.156–9), floating freely around the band’s regular metre—and the spaces in between, like the ma of Japanese culture, or Miles;
• Jazz musos have a fine sense of how and when to use vibrato (e.g. Miles again). Szwed cites Billie: “When I got into show business you had to have the shake. If you didn’t, you were dead… That big vibrato fits a few voices, but those that have it usually have it too much. I just don’t like it. You have to use it sparingly. You know, the hard thing is not to do that shake.” Her use of vibrato was carefully calibrated—Szwed notes how she would often set a single note in motion by increasing the width of vibrato just before moving on to the next note or phrase.

For every aspect of learning, style, and creativity, it’s always worth returning to Paul Berliner, Thinking in jazz, often cited in my series on jazz.

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So here’s a second playlist to follow my first post—every song a true gem.

I’ll get by, 1937 (Szwed, pp.192–3), the breezy instrumentals belying Billie’s minimalist singing:

All of me, 1941:

Billie’s blues live at the Met in 1944—slower than her 1936 recording (Griffin, pp.134–8):

Cf. Live at Carnegie Hall in 1956.

Three versions of Yesterdays—1939:

1952:

and 1956, again live at Carnegie Hall, with extreme contrasts:

Three recordings of My man, 1937 (Szwed, pp.249–50):

1948:

and 1952:

Very often her style evokes the Chinese concept “the Great Music is sparse in sound” (dayin xisheng 大音希声, often applied to the qin zither)—such as the lapidary How am I to know?, 1944:

with the horns commenting softly on the action “like a Greek chorus” (Will Friedwald, in Gourse, p.126) (contrast Jack Leonard 1939, or Frank Sinatra 1940).

Also from 1944, and just as entrancing in its minimalism, is I’ll be seeing you (Szwed pp.238–40)—where her free-tempo meditation over the band’s slow pulse “almost seems as if she is treating each word as a separate phrase” (again, contrast Jo Stafford, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby):

The arrangement is by Eddie Haywood, whose noodlings on piano remind me of Messiaen. Possibly it would only occur to Deryck Cooke that the song’s opening phrases suggest the finale of Mahler 3!

Both songs are highly reminiscent of Embraceable you, featured in my first post on Billie. And yet another 1944 recording, for those stuck in the Casablanca groove—As time goes by.

Gloomy Sunday, 1941 (Szwed, pp.226–9):

I mentioned Strange fruit in my post on Nina Simone, with links to Billie’s 1939 recording and 1959 performance. While I debate whether to impertinently write more in a separate post, the song is much discussed—perhaps starting with Szwed and Griffin, not to mention David Margolick, Strange fruit: Billie Holiday and the biography of a song (2001).

Pundits feel a need to defend or lament the singing of Billie’s last few years. The string backings of Lady in satin (1958) divided fans (Szwed, pp.260–64); though some songs work better than others, her voice will still enchant those without doctrinal axes to grind. And always watch in awe that 1957 TV appearance!

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Bandleaders like Teddy Wilson, Count Basie, and Artie Shaw, as well as a host of pianists and horn players, were unanimous in their deep admiration for Billie (besides Szwed, see Griffin, pp. 17–20). Her own appreciation of them is significant too, shown most movingly in the 1957 TV show. Much has been written about Billie’s deep bond with her musical soulmate Lester Young. Amidst all the myth-making, Griffin (pp.84–93) finds particular value in the recordings of 1955 rehearsals on Songs and conversations (playlist here; cf. Nat Hentoff, in Gourse, pp.108–10).

Szed cites Artie Shaw:

I gave her a record of Debussy’s L’après midi d’un faune. She could sing the whole thing, the top line: Da, da-da-da-da-da-dee***—she could do the whole thing. Didn’t have the range for it—but she had a very good ear.

and adds:

It must have meant as much to her as it did to him: she still had the recording until she died, and often played it for guests.

One afternoon, the harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick invited her to his apartment (Szwed, pp.52–3):

While Billie put away the better part of a bottle of rum, I played Bach for her. Her face registered everything, and no manifestation of the music seemed to escape her… I could have used her like a precision instrument to monitor my performance of the G minor English suite simply by watching the subtle variations of expression on her face show me with an infinitely sensitive instrument to monitor what was coming off and what was not. Her own performances, heard through the haze of cigarette smoke in a nightclub, gave heartrending glimpses of a raw and bleeding sensibility condemned to exploitation on every side, unsustained by the protective bulwarks that education and privilege could have given her, and destined, as I knew from the day I first saw her, to end in the gutter.

Later, the two of them sat together at the keyboard. Since Billie could not read music, he played a piece through once, but only once, so she could sing it. “Holiday had the most extraordinary gift of phrasing that I’d ever heard in a singer”, he said. “Once she heard it, she knew exactly how the tune should go”.

Most jazz musicians have never relied on notation, but find it a useful tool to augment their oral/aural training; but for a singer like Billie it was a blessing to be unhampered by little black dots on the page, both in pitch and rhythm. And having internalised an original song, she would then constantly re-compose it (cf. Unpacking “improvisation”). Her finely-tuned ear is further evinced by Leonard Feather’s blindfold test, where Billie comments on twelve tracks by a variety of performers (Gourse, pp.57–62).

OK, I’ll keep listening, and I trust you will too. My Playlist of songs has some amazing tracks, but no-one, in any genre, can ever compare to Billie…

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* Also the author of biographies of Miles Davis and Alan Lomax that I must read.

** I’m not inclined to make too much of Paul Bowles’s comment after hearing her 1946 Town Hall concert, describing her voice as “like modern Greek song, Balkan song, conto [cante!] jondo… Her vocalisation is actually nearer to north Africa than to west Africa”.

*** One too many “da”s has crept in there, but hey!