Billie Holiday (16 page)

The Teddy Wilson small group sessions were the only chance these men had to play with their peers instead of being the best of the whole band . . . The music that was produced was a rare monthly event—art for art's sake . . . As far as Billie Holiday was concerned, she was very popular with musicians. You might call her a musicians' singer, and she was in the company of soloists who were on a par with herself.

In retrospect, the pairing of Teddy Wilson and Billie Holiday seems like an act of divine casting. Wilson's elegance at the piano was not then the norm in jazz. His clean melodic lines and perfectly chosen and
executed arpeggios complemented Billie's lean song lines. He understood how to match his countermelodies to what she was singing and to fill in between her vocal lines to enhance the texture of the song. There was nothing facile or obvious about their interaction, and there was never a miscue. Wilson may have preferred a different quality of voice than Holiday's, but that is never reflected in his playing. Within a year he would be accompanying Ella Fitzgerald and Helen Forrest.

The critical and popular response to these recordings was largely positive, especially in Europe, where some of the most effusive praise for them was first published. (Hammond himself wrote his first appreciation of Holiday in Britain.) There were a few critics, however, who thought that Wilson and Holiday were a match only in that what they were creating was not
hot
jazz—bold, fast, impassioned music. Hugues Panassié, Europe's most important jazz writer, said that Wilson had a finger style, with intelligent and well-exercised fingers, but that it was not a style of the heart. He had no respect at all for what he thought were Holiday's strange melodic twists.

Music publishers in the United States were likewise dissatisfied with Holiday's singing, which posed a potential problem. In those days the source of most new songs for recording was the publishers, who brought them to record companies. For their purposes, vocals that departed too far from the written melody would be harder to sell, both because they could sound too strange for popular taste and because the recorded version of the songs would be different from that provided in the sheet music, which was then a big source of money from sales to amateur musicians and singers.

It's commonly believed that Billie Holiday was forced to sing songs that were not up to the level of her artistry, that she recorded whatever she could just to survive, or that as an African American singer she was given only the leftovers, the lightweight material, with the best songs going to white singers. But a survey of her entire output of recordings doesn't support any of these beliefs. “A Sailboat in the Moonlight,” for example, was one of her songs that was considered fluff that had been
rejected by the better singers. Written by John Jacob Loeb and Carmen Lombardo, the song was first recorded by Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians and reached number one on the
Billboard
Hit Parade by August 1937. Billie Holiday and Teddy Wilson went into the studio with it less than a month after Lombardo, and saxophonist Johnny Hodges also recorded it with Buddy Clark as the singer and members of the Duke Ellington band (including Ellington himself on piano) in the same month. The song itself may have been fluff, but rather than being a leftover, it seems to have been an obvious choice for those seeking at least some portion of commercial success. Listening to Lombardo's hit version is essential to understanding what Holiday does with the song. She makes no concession to popular taste, departing far from the original melody, though she does keep the lyrics intact and understandable, silly though they may be. In fact, the clarity and precision of her enunciation of them is basic to what makes the piece work for her. She stresses the words “just” and “two,” makes the rhymes “setting” and “letting” and “drift” and “lift” ring against each other, and extends the “A” in “A chance to sail away” in the first chorus. Then, after putting stresses between the beats during her second appearance in the song, she hammers every syllable but the first on the beat in “A chance to drift for you to lift,” and then shouts the last line as if she were her own band taking the song out. Meanwhile, Lester Young has been constructing a tenor saxophone countermelody that enhances her singing and offers her touch points for response and new variations.

If anything, most of the great singers have recorded weaker and more trivial songs than Holiday: Consider Frank Sinatra's “Mama Will Bark,” Rosemary Clooney's “Botch-a-Me,” Jo Stafford's “Shrimp Boats,” or Ella Fitzgerald's “My Wubba Dolly.” In fact, it was Ella, a more popular singer than Billie, who often had success with cheerful nonsense songs and juvenilia. “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” her 1938 hit with the Chick Webb band, was not even a pop composition, but a rural African American girls' game song. Yet she had the look, the spirit of youth, that these pieces needed. Ella was the ingénue to Billie's worldly sophisticate. She
was the band singer the swing era folks wanted, even if Billie might have been the one they needed.

“
Good” jazz songs do not always make for great jazz. As Jelly Roll Morton, the man who claimed he invented jazz, put it, jazz is not in the songs themselves, but in how they are played or sung. When it was suggested to Morton that Scott Joplin's “Maple Leaf Rag” was not the sort of material that was suitable for jazz, he objected: “You see, jazz is applied to the tune, and the quality must be in the operator . . .” Jazz was not a thing, in other words, but a method, a way of styling music. Nor was jazz about making trite or poor songs better. All jazz musicians work at making whatever music they are playing better, but they do so through recomposition, variation, invention, improvisation, and always aim for a new creation. Their approach is very different from that of classical singers or musicians, for whom the written score is paramount. The goal of classical musicians is to perform that score as well as possible in their own interpretation of it, but the score is always respected. Bad compositions, even those written by great composers, are not greatly improved by good musicians, and most classical musicians are not likely to try to improve them.

Billie Holiday, like all great jazz musicians, was first and foremost an improviser and secondly an interpreter, and when a tune like “What a Little Moonlight Can Do” offered her little in the way of melody or lyrics, she compensated by detuning the melody, shifting the rhythmic accents around, and ignoring the moderato tempo indicated on the song's original sheet music, taking it instead at a stompingly immoderate presto. “It's Like Reaching for the Moon” is likewise a minor piece of songwriting, but a modest exercise in metaphysical pop poetry, a reaching for love.
Holiday sings it in a key high enough to make her figuratively look upward, and lets words like “stars” fall while she extends the word “reach” out into musical space. She is accompanied by Johnny Hodges and Harry Carney, two of Ellington's long-term colleagues, musicians who improvise contrasting flurries of notes behind her elongated and spatial lines. It's a vocal that is also interesting for her rare use of intense vibrato, here stretched to the point of the tremulous.

In July 1936 John Hammond's role as producer of the Wilson-Holiday recordings passed in large part to Bernie Hanighen, a young man from Nebraska and a graduate of Harvard, where he had led his own band, written songs and musicals, and, like Hammond when he was attending Yale, spent his weekends in the cabarets of Harlem. Under Hanighen, Holiday continued in much the same musical context but she was now recording for Vocalion Records, one of the many subsidiaries that the American Record Corporation (later to become Columbia Records) owned or leased. But he gave Billie more time to sing on each record, bringing her vocal in earlier on each track, followed by the musician's solos, then having her return to reprise the song just before the ending. He doubled her pay and put her name on the record as a leader for the first time, even though her role in picking songs and musicians remained the same.

“No Regrets,” recorded at their first session together on July 10, 1936, showed her work continuing at the same high level under her new producer. This song was almost a cheerful farewell to a love affair, their education being worth the price it cost. Billie projects the image of a woman leaving in broad daylight, sashaying out the door with nothing broken, pride intact. Artie Shaw and Bunny Berigan play brilliantly alongside her, clarinet and trumpet winding together in a duo with the joyous spirit of young white musicians discovering black jazz. (“No Regrets” makes for a fascinating parallel with Édith Piaf's “Non, je ne regrette rien.” The Little Sparrow's interpretation is in the spirit of an MGM production, more appropriate to a scene of her riding out of Algeria with the French Foreign Legion, defeated, but her arm raised in a salute of both farewell and independence.)

That same initial session with Hanighen is also notable for producing the first nonoperatic recording of a song from George Gershwin's
Porgy and Bess
,
a show that had closed on Broadway only a few months earlier and was still mired in controversy. An opera about rural black people, written by a Southern aristocrat and two songwriters with ties to Tin Pan Alley, staged entirely by white people, was slated from the start
for trouble. No one could be entirely dispassionate about it unless he or she was not an American. The lines of dissension were not drawn so neatly as white vs. black. There were those on either side of the racial divide who liked it or argued vehemently against it, and there was a high vs. low cultural split as well. George Gershwin described it as a folk opera, but it did not feature any folk songs. Some people didn't even consider it an opera: How could a pop songwriter compose an opera? What could a white man know about black folks? And that degrading libretto in dialect!

The fact remained that
Porgy and Bess
contained excellent songs, and everyone seemed to have recognized that. There were calls for the opera to be boycotted by black performers, but no one suggested that the songs should go. Duke Ellington, an urbane man who avoided public conflict wherever he could, said that “it does not use the Negro idiom. It was not the music of Catfish Row or any other kind of Negroes.” But Ellington recorded songs from
Porgy and Bess
, as did hundreds of jazz musicians of every color.

People may have argued about how Gershwin got the idea for “Summertime,” the lullaby that opened the opera—did it come from the old Negro spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” or from a Ukrainian Yiddish lullaby?—but they knew it was significant: It has become one of the most recorded songs in music history, with some thirty thousand versions, and a jazz standard. Billie's recording of it on July 10, 1936, reached the hit charts, but what's most fascinating about her version is that she turns the opera's plaintive lullaby into something aggressive and vaguely ominous, reminiscent of one of Duke Ellington's early Cotton Club “jungle” themes, with Artie Shaw's clarinet dancing around Bunny Berigan's growling trumpet to the rhythm of Cozy Cole's tom-toms.

When Billie recorded a second number from
Porgy and Bess
on December 10, 1948, her pianist, Bobby Tucker, said that he had never before played “I Loves You, Porgy” (or the other song recorded on that date, “My Man”). Both were improvised at the session with Billie. The
version of “Porgy” she sang was extracted from the opera's duet between
Bess and Porgy, dropping Porgy's part and the verse to the song, and editing out some of the stanzas and the choral part. While she recast the folk dialect of the lyrics (singing, “I love you, Porgy” instead of “I loves you, Porgy” and “I want to stay with you” in lieu of “I wants to stay with you,” etc.), she sang the pieces stylistically as close to the blues as one could and still recognize the song. In a radio interview she gave in late December 1948 on the
Curfew Club
from San Francisco, Billie acknowledged that she had altered the song from the original opera score:

I just made some records for Decca. I made “Porgy.” It's from
Porgy and Bess
, but you won't recognize it because I don't sing it anything like they do in the play, and I also put a middle to it [laughs] . . . I hope Gershwin doesn't mind [chuckles].

Billie's sometime producer Greer Johnson thought “Porgy” was the most beautiful song Billie had ever done, and he asked her why she didn't sing it more often. She said that she didn't think that “
Porgy and Bess
had done much for the race.” But
she did own records by Gershwin, including
Rhapsody in Blue
and an album of selections from
Porgy and Bess
. Singer Thelma Carpenter said that she and Billie would often take the parts of Porgy and Bess and sing their music along with the recordings.

Journalist Al Aronowitz, a colleague of Bill Dufty's at the
New York Post
, recalled the night he and his wife, the Duftys, and Billie went out for an evening, first to Birdland to see the Miles Davis Quintet, then to Hell's Kitchen to hear a Beat poetry reading.
At one point Aronowitz asked Billie why she had never recorded “My Man's Gone Now” from
Porgy and Bess
: “I know! I know!!” she answered. “He asked me to sing that song when they opened that show. He asked me to play the part of the girl who sings that song.” “Who asked you?” Aronowitz questioned. “George Gershwin,” she replied, and explained:

No, I couldn't sing that song night after night after night. It's too sad. It's the saddest song ever sung. That song breaks your heart.
It would've killed me. It killed the girl who got the part. She sang it night after night after night after night and she dies. It broke her heart. Singing that song would've killed me, too.

The part of Serena, the character who performed that song, was played by Ruby Elzy in the 1935 production of
Porgy and Bess
. She died at age thirty-five, just a week after her last performance. Though he auditioned over one thousand singers for
Porgy
, it seems unlikely that Gershwin would have offered Holiday the role when he was casting in 1934–1935 because all of the performers he eventually chose (with the exception of John Bubbles, who played Sportin' Life) had been classically trained. Later, James Baldwin, in a review of Otto Preminger's 1959 film version of
Porgy and Bess
starring Dorothy Dandridge and Sidney Poitier, noted Billie Holiday's recent passing and suggested that she would have made “a splendid, if somewhat overwhelming Bess.”