The passages I’ve so far quoted from the Benny Green book might create the impression that he’s a perceptive but harsh critic who likes to destroy great figures in jazz. That is not the case. 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:
In an essay about Coleman Hawkins, Benny Green says:
“In any case, objective criticism is a platonic impossibility which would not even be desirable even if it were possible. The only criticism which is readable is the fiercely prejudiced, fiercely subjective criticism by a man who cares enough to show his enthusiasms.”
With that “fiercely prejudiced, fiercely subjective” attitude, he writes about Ornette Coleman. Before writing anything about Coleman, Benny Green talks about critics and their mistake at the beginning regarding Charlie Parker. Then:
“The frame of mind in which most critics trooped down to Scott’s Club to hear the ageing enfant terrible may best be described by reciting the false syllogism which had become the 1st rule of conduct for all jazz reviewers. ‘Parker sounded mad, and he turned out to be a great musician. Ornette Coleman sounds mad. Therefore Ornette Coleman must be a great musician.’”
I myself haven’t heard much of Coleman, but my experience not only hasn’t been very favourable, it also makes me indifferent to everything else he has created. I have a strong dislike of the screeching noise in “Lonely Woman”, which is more painful than hearing a fork scratching a plate. Now that you’ve seen Benny Green tear apart Dave Brubeck, prepare to see him flinging a knife at Ornette Coleman. Slash slash.
“… in the past 2 or 3 years, Coleman had become a multi-instrumentalist. Part of his early fame had rested on the fact that he preferred blowing a plastic alto saxophone, although why this should have contributed to the legend of his genius it is hard to say. So far from being a crazy novelty, plastic saxophones had been tried and found wanting many years before Coleman took up their cause. In any case, it is difficult to understand on what basis a man can see something spectacular about a plastic instrument who had never handled a metal one. […] But Coleman had come to London armed not only with his plastic saxophone, but with a trumpet and a violin as well, and if it is true to say that he was at least reasonably familiar with the technical problems of playing jazz on a saxophone, it is also true to say that he apparently had only the most rudimentary of how to handle the 2 new instruments. Coleman as a saxophone player is a fascinating curiosity, an artist whose technique is a bewildering patchwork of dexterity and the most shocking ineptitude. […] But what of Coleman the trumpeter or Coleman the violinist? What he actually succeeded in doing at Scott’s was to defy all rational criticism. Once he began to struggle with the trumpet or to saw savagely at the violin, the process of ratiocination collapsed entirely. There was no criterion by which to judge. It was not so much bad playing as no playing at all, not so much poor music as antimusic.”
Such fun. This essay was written in 1966, in case anyone’s wondering. Benny Green quotes himself in another review:
“It ought to be clear to anyone visiting Ronnie Scott’s Club in the last few days that it is not possible to criticise the playing of Ornette Coleman. The act of criticism is necessarily connected with what the artist is supposed to be doing, and as I haven’t the remotest idea what Ornette Coleman is supposed to be doing, all criticism is stilled. It remains only to report in factual terms what happens when he arrives on the bandstand. Coleman begins with what might be laughingly called an alto saxophone solo at a fast tempo, brief and to the point, lasting, say, 10 or 15 minutes, in the course of which both harmony and melody are given the brush. Next comes a change of mood, that is to say, the same thing is played slow instead of fast. The violin interlude which follows is even more startling. Coleman staggers through some mysterious pattern of his own devising, sawing away with a ferocity which belies the dolorous expression in his face. […] He is not, however, completely without shrewdness. By mastering the useful trick of playing the entire chromatic scale at any given moment, he has absolved himself from the charge of continuously playing the wrong notes. Like a stopped clock, Coleman is right at least twice a day.”
Ha ha ha. What a devastating review. Benny Green is my new model.
I’m reading Such Sweet Thunder: Benny Green on Jazz—Benny Green the British saxophonist (1927- 1998), not Bennie Green the American trombonist (1923- 1977) and not Benny Green the American pianist (1963), all in jazz, confusingly. This Benny Green is very critical of Dave Brubeck. He writes in “Jazz Goes to College”:
“Brubeck was a new phenomenon in jazz, a perennial student who had never worked in anybody’s group but his own. This in itself was no disqualification, although it was silly to pretend it was much help. It seemed to me that he played the piano so clumsily, and with such consistent clumsiness, that from the day I first attended one of his performances, my impatience was tempered by a touch of that compassion which one usually feels at the spectacle of a fellow musician flung by circumstances into a hopelessly false position. For either Brubeck chose to accept the myth of his own infallibility, or he did not, each of the options being worse than the other, either to accept the reality of a genius he did not in fact possess, or be obliged to strive hopelessly for it every time he confronted a keyboard. At first I was surprised that such footling juvenilia should be taken even halfway seriously by those who knew of Art Tatum and Bud Powell. Slowly my surprise was replaced by wry acceptance of the fact that possibly those who knew of Tatum and Powell and still took Brubeck seriously did not know of Tatum and Powell after all.”
That is harsh. The essay was written in 1973. Dave Brubeck’s Time Out, for example, came out in 1959, and is now still called one of the best jazz albums of the year. Benny Green goes on to say:
“Attendance at Brubeck concerts for me became a nightmare which I would not have missed for worlds. The images were too rich to pass over, of Brubeck falling deeper and deeper into the rut of some wretched cross-rhythm, digging a pit for himself with such relentless determination that soon he falls into it and disappears from view; Brubeck climbing out again and arriving at the same juncture of a song for 6 or 7 successive choruses, ‘improvising’ the same phrase each time; Brubeck shyly telling us that what he is now about to play is more or less impossible but that he is going to be very gallant and play it anyway.”
Wow. In 1964, Benny Green wrote another essay, named “Dave Brubeck”, talking more about the deficiencies and shortcomings of Brubeck and the quartet. The essay, or review, ended with:
“Audiences continue to be duped by Brubeck’s subtle flattery. When they applaud the trick of playing 4 beats a bar against a background of only 3, they are applauding not only Brubeck’s cleverness but their own percipience in noticing it. They enjoy being offered titles like ‘Blue Rondo à la Turk’, because the implication is there that they understand blues, rondos and even Turks. Brubeck appeals to the culture vulture that resides in us all, the beast in the attic of so many jazz fanciers. His quartet produces the warm glow which comes with the assurance that the better artistic things in life are after all within our scope. But to judge Brubeck’s music by the highest jazz standards is to marvel at the comparative neglect of so many more musical groups.”
Erm… In both of these essays, Benny Green attacked Dave Brubeck together with John Lewis (the jazz pianist, not the UK department store) and Modern Jazz Quartet. He mentioned both together, again, in a 1973 essay called “Cult and Culture”. These names seem like his obsessions. I don’t know enough about music theory and techniques to evaluate his criticisms, but Benny Green is no Philip Larkin. Whilst I don’t agree with everything he says, he has high opinion of Miles Davis and Charlie Parker, and my favourite jazz musicians such as John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington (not sure about his view on Charles Mingus and Clifford Brown). When I don’t agree with him, as it’s hard to agree with his mockery of jazz singers in general except for Billy Holiday, and except for people like Louis Armstrong, “whose methods of vocal expression are so clearly extensions of their instrumental personalities”, I can see his point. What do you think? Is Dave Brubeck overrated, or does Benny Green fail to recognise his talent?
