Billie Holiday (21 page)

It was a time and place for experimentation, and small bands were often assembled for a single night. There was no clear musical orthodoxy in these clubs, none of the constraints on age, era, or musical politics that we have seen in our own times. It was possible to move from club to club cheaply and with ease, hear musics of different styles and eras, and see musicians of different persuasions working together. The whole history of jazz was on display. Both fans and musicians moved freely on this street congested with music, some visiting their colleagues on their break, others trying to squeeze as much playing or listening as possible into a single night. Sometimes bands ended their sets by marching through the audience and out onto the street. Even the clubs moved, some as many as five times within a block or two, jockeying for advantage. It was the kind of organic aesthetic that could be found only in Manhattan and New Orleans, the mix that no city planners or arts czars have since been able or willing to create. Not that it was heaven for all. A few clubs actively discouraged black customers unless they were famous, and some ugly scenes involving soldiers and musicians occasionally erupted.

The excitement these places generated was in part the result of a semi-legal post-Prohibition atmosphere, and in the mid-1940s by some lurid accounts that began to be circulated in newspapers and magazines about the addictions of jazz musicians, the horrors of heroin, and mobsters using the clubs as fronts. Bebop made its first full appearance in 1944 when it began to move from Harlem to these midtown clubs, and it threatened to became known as the soundtrack of a drug culture. Addiction was something of an occupational hazard because of the heavy circulation of drugs by dealers through the clubs and streets, and the ease of use by customers and performers alike. Some musicians seemed to wear their addiction like uniforms at the home front, or medals from the American Campaign. Their use of narcotics made them part of an elite of sorts, binding them together as artistes. But drug use was not
necessarily something done under the weight of suffering, pain, or failure. It could also be celebratory, enhancing the best moments of life, intensifying peak events.

If Billie Holiday (along with drummer Gene Krupa) was one of the most publicly acknowledged addicts in jazz, she was always ambivalent about discussing the subject. Her openness about addiction was to a certain extent forced on her; her jail sentences and struggles with the police were common knowledge. Whatever private
feelings she may have had about her drug use, her autobiography portrayed her as hurt by her image as a user, and as one who held a quite conventional morality concerning addiction.

Even though she had built up a large following by this point in her career, Billie frequently worked these Fifty-second Street clubs, as she would never have been asked to perform at the large elite nightclubs of Manhattan like the Stork Club, the Plaza, or the Blue Angel.

 • • • • • 

When Milt Gabler first heard Billie sing “Lover Man” in one of the clubs, they both felt it could be a pop hit, so he signed her to Decca Records for a one-year, twelve-song recording contract, moving her away from his low-distribution (and low-pay) boutique Commodore label. For the first time, she would receive royalties on sales, and would be given the support of an orchestra with a string section. The two-year Musicians Union strike against the record companies was ending, and this was the first chance that Decca had to record Holiday.

“Lover Man” is another song with unclear history and authorship. Although in
Lady Sings the Blues
Billie seems to imply that it had been written for her by Jimmy Davis and that pianist Roger “Ram” Ramirez had little to do with its composition, it had been copyrighted in 1941, several years before her session on October 4, 1944, with Ramirez listed as composer along with Jimmy Davis and James Sherman as lyricists. Gabler had already recorded it on Commodore Records with pianist Eddie Heywood, and then had him record it again for Decca.
The song on the other side of the Decca
single was an instrumental version of “Begin the Beguine” played with a boogie-woogie bass line that became a minor hit after Artie Shaw's recording, and so managed to draw attention to “Lover Man.”

The song alternates between minor and major, and Holiday's dreamy, mesmerizing performance makes it seem as if nothing—the orchestra, the composer, the studio—matters but her singing. She sings it as slowly as a song can be sung without the flow of the melody coming apart, and yet her rhythm was steady. And after her passionate phrasing of “Huggin' and a kissin' / Oh, what we've been missing,” she owned this song. Though it was clearly aimed at a pop market and jukebox play, “Lover Man” would become a favorite of jazz musicians, especially after Sarah Vaughan and Charlie Parker later recorded it.

At the same session she recorded “No More,” a now forgotten song by composer Toots Camarata and lyricist Bob Russell. Camarata had a long and broad career as a musician, arranger, and composer working in every type of media, and Russell had written lyrics and music for numerous singers, bands, and films. Billie recorded two other songs with Russell's lyrics, “Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me,” set to Duke Ellington's music, and “Crazy He Calls Me,” written for Billie (with its famous office poster lines, “The difficult I'll do right now / The impossible will take a little while”). “No More” is an odd song, strikingly irregular in harmony and heavy with vernacular lyrics.

You ain't gonna bother me no more, no how

Love just goes so far, no more

It may or may not impress on first hearing, but singing it is quite difficult, and even the tune alone is hard to remember. While it has a fairly conventional chord structure, it's a minefield for a vocalist: a melody with notes outside the expected scales scattered throughout that produce an angular, restless, and chromatic feeling. Performing “No More” requires an ear finely tuned enough to know how the individual notes fit in the overall structure of the piece and the vocal assurance to resist the temptation to sing the expected notes in the melody instead of the
dissonant notes called for, and still stay in tune. Only a few singers have recorded the song, and they were surely tempted by Holiday's success with it. If anyone thought that her being an untrained singer meant that Holiday was prone to inaccuracy, he need only listen to this performance, one that she thought was among her best.

A month later Holiday recorded another difficult song, Leonard Bernstein's “Big Stuff,” the prologue to the ballet
Fancy Free
, which he created with choreographer Jerome Robbins
.
Instead of an orchestra performing an overture in the pit for the premiere at the old Metropolitan Opera House, the audience heard the recording of a song coming out of a radio onstage, an incredibly radical start to a ballet that brought Afro-inflected music and a tale of three sailors on leave in New York cruising for women into the whitest of all Euro-American art forms. Bernstein had seen Billie at Café Society (where he had also performed), and Robbins had choreographed and danced “Strange Fruit” in 1940, and they wanted her voice to set the tone for the evening. But because of lack of money, Bernstein's sister Shirley was heard on the record that was used that night in April. The ballet was an instant success and had an extended run, and Broadway and movie adaptations (under the title
On the Town
) followed. As he was readying the music to
Fancy Free
for a recording by Decca later that year, Bernstein was able to get Billie to sing the opening song, an abstraction of a blues with an ancient rolling bass figure, odd intervals and phrasings, and some explicit, if awkward, lyrics:

Let's take a ride in my gravy train

The door's open wide,

Holiday recorded it four times over the next year and a half, first with a dance band, then with an orchestra, with the arrangers and conductors changing, and each time she made the melody more believable, interesting, and rhythmically flexible than it read on paper, and hit all the notes, even though it lay out of her normal range. The rerecordings were made at Bernstein's request, though his reasons for rejecting the first two recordings are not known. Milt Gabler said the problem with the third
version was that Bernstein objected to Holiday's adding an extra note to the piece. If so, it would not be an unreasonable objection within the classical tradition, but then why would he have asked Billie Holiday, of all people, to record it, known as she was for changing notes in virtually everything she sang? It should be said, though, that she stayed close to his composed melody in every recording she did. The last version, which required three and a half hours and five jazz musicians to complete, was finally approved by Bernstein and was used for some future performances of the ballet.

 • • • • • 

Singers sometimes develop relationships with songwriters who tailor works to fit them. Holiday had several such partners, Arthur Herzog Jr., most notably, and though it appeared to be a contentious partnership, the difficulties seem to have arisen only after their collaboration had ended and Billie's fame was spreading. George Cory and Douglass Cross were two songwriters that she met through Mabel Mercer, and their song “I'll Look Around” was one Billie recorded after she'd heard Mercer's version. Cory and Cross (better known for “I Left My Heart in San Francisco”) were entranced by her, following her about, running errands, waking her for performances, and wrote “Deep Song” for her, a torch number that threatens to turn into a horror blues à la Robert Johnson's “Hellhound on My Trail”:

The blues crawl in my door

To lick my heart once more

In 1939 and 1940 Billie recorded songs by Irene Wilson (later known as Irene Kitchings), a pianist and bandleader who was married to Teddy Wilson when Billie recorded with him. When Teddy left Irene for a showgirl, she and Billie became close. Bandleader Benny Carter encouraged Irene to compose songs, and Billie steered her to Arthur Herzog. Together Wilson and Herzog wrote four numbers that Billie recorded:
“Some Other Spring” (July 5, 1939), “I'm Pulling Through” (June 7, 1940), “Ghost of Yesterday,” and “What Is This Going to Get Us?” (both February 29, 1940). They were pieces that Irene said expressed her feelings after Teddy left her. (Irene Wilson is not to be confused—as she always is—with Irene Higginbotham, another songwriter, who composed “Good Morning Heartache” and “No Good Man,” both recorded by Billie on January 22, 1946.) Producer Bernie Hanighen also wrote songs that Billie recorded: “Yankee Doodle Never Went to Town” (October 25, 1936), “When a Woman Loves a Man” (January 12, 1938), and “If the Moon Turns Green” (May or June 1952).

 • • • • • 

“My Man” was so strongly identified with Holiday that eighteen versions of it by her exist on record. The song's two-part, major-minor, verse-refrain structure betrays its French origins, and its alternating sung and spoken passages were stock in trade for chanteuses who communicated a sense of confession and authenticity to Parisian audiences. The song was originally written in French as “Mon homme” by Jacques Charles for a 1920 revue and was first sung by Mistinguett, the great music hall diva. Charles's inspiration for the song was Francis Carco's play
Mon homme
and the recent death of singer Gaby Deslys, whose husband, Harry Pilcher, was having an affair with Mistinguett. Since Pilcher was also desired by Jacques Charles, the song, then, may speak of a real or fantasized obsessive and violent relationship between two men, which would change the emotional weight of the song, if not in degree then in kind.

It was introduced in America by Fanny Brice in the
Ziegfeld Follies
during a time in which Brice had lost everything she had, trying (and failing) to keep her gangster husband, Nicky Arnstein, out of prison. Audiences at the time read her performance as autobiographical as she sang it absolutely motionless, costumed in a torn dress like an apache girl under a bridge in Paris.
She paused frequently throughout the song to heighten the drama, the song's structure was simplified by the
Ziegfeld people, who also added new lines, and it was performed by both acting and singing it.

That was the way Holiday presented it, much to the chagrin of those who preferred the jazz singer of a few years before. Her recording with the Teddy Wilson Orchestra on November 1, 1937, was a lively dance tune with abbreviated lyrics and some misplaced band work, which made it feel like a movie in which none of the actors quite knew what the film was about. Eleven years later, on December 10, 1948, she radically reconceived the song for Decca, slowing it to a crawl, rich with recitative, dramatic pauses, and especially memorable now for the addition of the original descending spoken lines “He isn't true / He beats me, too / What can I do?” Even though these words are often apologized for or edited out completely (as in the
Glee Songbook
), much like some of the lyrics to “Gloomy Sunday,” those who heard it when she first sang it may have read it as Billie's revealing the pain of her sacrifice for love. Some of today's listeners may also interpret it as Holiday's offering herself to save other women from the pain she had endured.

In July 1952 she recorded it in the studio again for Clef Records (later Verve Records), surrounded by a small group of jazz musicians in an effort to duplicate her 1937 recording. Though
she remained in a torch mode that was not entirely satisfactory in the jazz setting, she maintained her pauses, with the same tortured effect.

Town Hall Concert, February 16, 1946

Greer Johnson, who knew Billie from the days he and Elizabeth Hardwick had followed Holiday from club to club, had become a publicist and done some concert promotion, and continued to stay close to Billie. He thought she was far too important to be treated as just a nightclub singer and should be presented in concert as the equal to a Lotte Lehmann, the greatest German lieder singer of the 1930s and 1940s, and be billed as America's Jazz
Artist
. In a moment of wild enthusiasm he even imagined her singing the cycles of Schubert and Schumann lieder,
arranged just for her voice. Though he failed to convince her of
that
, he did get her to agree to perform a cycle of her best songs, structuring an entire concert around a single theme or mood, and arranged so the songs flowed together.