His essay on Billie Holiday is written with such sensitivity that he makes me listen to her music again.
“… when one listens to all these recordings indiscriminately, the skilful songs and the average jingles, the peculiar truth emerges that for some reason they were all more or less as good as each other, that apparently Billie Holiday was independent of the material she used. Songs came to her as competent minor products of the popular music machine of the day went through the treatment, and emerged as the touching expression of thoughts and emotions their composers had never dreamed of. ‘Me, Myself, and I’ sung by anyone else would be no more than the slightly cretinous but not objectionable expression of the infatuation of one person for another. The Billie Holiday recording is positively joyous. It abounds with the expression of a happy, helpless love, so that the triteness of the lyric disappears to be replaced by a wit of expression whose incongruity with the original tune is almost comical.”Note that this comes from a man who is against the concept of jazz singers, except for people like Louis Armstrong, “whose methods of vocal expression are so clearly extensions of their instrumental personalities”. The idea of a jazz singer, to him, goes against the improvisational nature of jazz.
But Billie Holiday is an exception.
Benny Green writes about “Body and Soul”:
“When Billie sings the words, she invests them with an intensity achieved by the childishly simple device of singing them as though she meant them. The fact that she chooses to sing the lesser-known alternate lyrics on the last middle eight, the lines that begin ‘What lies before me, a future that’s stormy?’ suggests that she must have given close thought to the meaning of the words before singing them.”He reminds me of why there was a period in 2015 when I listened to Billie Holiday all day, almost exclusively. Hers might not be the kind of music we can enjoy all the time, but when we’re in the right mood, her performance beats everyone else’s in its intensity and depth of feeling.
It is amusing to see Benny Green denigrate Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. I’ve never felt much when listening to Sarah Vaughan, except for “Whatever Lola Wants” and “Lullaby of Birdland”, much as I admire her range and vocal techniques; Ella Fitzgerald is a singer I like a lot, but now I’m listening to Billie Holiday again—just place side by side their renditions of the same song, Lady Day almost always wins (except for “Summertime”, my favourite version is the one by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong). Billie Holiday makes the perfection of Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald appear hollow.
“Much later in her career, when the ravages of a desperately unhappy life were beginning to tell, her range shrank much more seriously, so that in singing old stand-bys like ‘Body and Soul’ and ‘These Foolish Things’, she dropped her key by a tone or sometimes more. But by then her voice had changed so profoundly in character that she was a different kind of artist altogether. The great virtue of the recordings from the 1st period was their heart-lifting optimism, a certain buoyancy of spirit which made the listen feel an affinity for a disembodied sound whose owner he might never have heard of before. I am convinced that for much of the time Billie was not consciously aware of what she was doing while she was doing it. To her, singing was not so much the exercise of an artistic function as the natural means of expression towards the world. This relationship involving the mechanics of making music is common enough among the best instrumentalists, but certainly no singer since Bessie Smith could be said to need to sing as desperately as Billie Holiday. The casual effects she threw off would be psychological masterstrokes had they been thought out and planned ahead. As it was, they remained emphatic triumphs of intuition.”He ends the essay with:
“… the normal rules applied to her no more at the end of her life than they had in the beginning. Whatever shortcomings there might now be in her breathing, her range and her pronunciation, she had retained, because it was a very real part of her personality, this unfailing ability to wrest out of every lyric the last drop of significance, and even to insert her own where the lyricist had failed to include it. As this was the very core of her art, the last recordings overcame their own technical limitations in a miraculous way.”That is beautiful.
My only complaint about the essay is that he doesn’t analyse some of her most famous songs such as “Strange Fruit” and “Gloomy Sunday”.
Here is a collection of tracks performed by Billie Holiday and Lester Young:
Wonderful write-up. Really enjoyed Green's appreciation of Holiday's late period. There's a weird pointless back-and-forth admirers have trying to say one era, say Wilson, is better than another, say Verve. This is Holiday we are talking about not some random, ever-changing pop group.
ReplyDeleteI've gone back and forth on this Holiday vs. Fitzgerald, etc. business. At first I was impressed by the sheer technique of Fitzgerald. Then I listened to Holiday and was underwhelmed. But the more I listened to her solely the more I could understand that she was doing pyrotechnics with a limited range of firepower. It was and still is incredible. I started to feel that Fitzgerald was all aesthetic. However, the more I delved into Fitzgerald's catalog and explored records like "Ella Sings Gershwin," "Ella in Hollywood," the Songbooks, etc. the more I began to realize that I wasn't approaching Fitzgerald quite correctly.
Holiday was easy to come to terms with because her emotional availability was easy to grasp. She always had a hint of despair behind even her most swinging tunes, as if she knew the happiness was only here for a time, and that kind of mindset is easily relatable for a modern audience. The smile of understanding, the "knowing actor" of Ella Fitzgerald is more difficult. But as I said, the more I listened the more I could say with certainty that, pointless as it is to rank or denigrate when we can have it all and in anyway, Ella Fitzgerald was the greatest jazz singer or even, simply, greatest singer in American music.
Funny enough, I think of her like Pope, in that she is an artist you have to actively pay attention to because they are so elegantly beguiling you can slip past the surface without feeling the depth. Her scatting is, of course, worthy of a music sheet and I suspect that many times she may have done that for a few of her hit pieces. But her improvisations and her generic flexibility is pretty unmatched in any jazz singer I've found.
In conclusion, however, I should say they are all great. I don't know how anyone could dislike vocal jazz with singers like Anita O'Day, Carmen McRae, Sinatra (who was a legitimate improvisor), Vaughan (who I'm still trying to work and understand), and that whole mid-century generation. Sorry for splattering this all over your comment section but I happened upon this post just when I was trying to settle these thoughts!
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I know exactly what you mean about going back and forth on the Fitzgerald vs Holiday thing. I do too, actually. In certain moods I prefer Billie Holiday, and vice versa.
I love Ella Fitzgerald best when she sings with Louis Armstrong though. Their voices go perfectly together.
Benny Green is an idiosyncratic critic, so some of his views may be peculiar, but I do think he's a fantastic jazz writer. His put-downs of Ornette Coleman and Dave Brubeck are just delicious.