Our Love Is Here to Stay

It's been a minute since I've listened to Lester Young or Teddy Wilson, but the two bring a smile to any listener's face. Every fan of Billie Holiday's best period (in the 1930s, I believe) will know that it is Wilson and Young who made her music light up with excellent accompaniment, solos, and passion.

Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth

John Szwed's Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth should be required reading for anyone interested in Billie Holiday. Not only does it function very well as a succinct and useful introduction and explanation of her music and influences, Szwed avoids the path of other biographers who focused on the sensationalism surrounding her personal life and difficulties she faced. Moreover, as an established jazz biographer who impressed me with his stunning (and serious) look at Sun Ra, Szwed is clearly familiar with jazz, its history, and the social context which produced Billie Holiday in a way that one does not often find in others. For example, Angela Davis, whose excellent black feminist look at Billie Holiday is also worthwhile, should not have tried to fit or categorize Holiday into the blues woman category, but someone like Szwed properly places her in a separate "category" as a jazz musician who brought a blues sensibility to torch songs and standards. In a sense, Davis is right about Billie Holiday recognizing herself as someone influenced by Bessie Smith and the blues, but as Szwed argues, she is just as much influenced by Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, earlier women singers from the minstrel era, and her own innovative approach to jazz. For a book under 200 pages, there is a depth of commentary and explication on Holiday's life and art that is surely rare to come across. I have not not read a similarly great work on a jazz musician since Kelley's biography of Monk or Mercer's biography of Wayne Shorter. 

No Regrets

Cecile McLorin Salvant adds a fresh take on a standard immortalized by Billie Holiday. 

Lover Man

Source

Roger Ram Ramirez, Afro-boricua New Yorker, gave us "Lover Man" through the lovely recordings of Billie Holiday. Though the song does not reflect Ramirez's Afro-Latino background, it certainly indicates the influence of Puerto Ricans in New York on the US jazz scene. For some other great renditions of this standard, check out Sarah Vaughan's, including this one I am in love with (and check this out, too, for an example of how the younger Sarah Vaughan expressed her balladry in the company of greats such as Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker). Last but certainly not least, Charlie Parker's recording of the song in a drunken mess is still worthwhile.

If Dreams Come True

I've always believed that the genius of Billie Holiday was her ability to turn second-rate material into gold. "If Dreams Come True" is a good example, a lyrically silly love song of the cutesy variety forced down Holiday's throat in her early years. In addition, Teddy Wilson, a genius of swing on the piano, as well as the rest of the band, make things interesting with lovely solos while Holiday coos and caresses us with her sweet and smooth delivery. For instance, listen to the song's long instrumental introduction, featuring Wilson tickling the keys. Or the musically delicious trombone and trumpet. Undoubtedly, any of Holiday's recordings featuring Wilson or Lester Young are guaranteed to be at least decent if not excellent. "In your caress, there's happiness!"

Body and Soul

 Esperanza Spalding

Coleman Hawkins here did a version of the jazz standard, "Body and Soul," that revolutionized jazz and interpretations of the song. Ken Burns Jazz tries to give this seminal recording import as being one of the earliest "pre-bop" jazz records. Regardless of how influential it was for the creation of bebop, the next evolution of jazz after swing, it is one of those timeless melodies and features brilliant blowing from Hawkins.

Billie Holiday here does a beautiful vocal rendition. "My days have grown so lonely, for you I cry..." Another beautiful moment: "I'm all for you body and soul." She also does a great live recording from a show in 1945 that's worth listening hearing. "I spend my days in longing, I'm wondering why it's me you're longing..." Also, check out her 1957 recording from her later days, when her voice was losing itself. She is accompanied by an accomplished guitarist, however.

John Coltrane's rendition of the song, featuring McCoy Tyner's skeletal characteristic piano, makes this my favorite version. Tyner's piano style always gets to me, and hearing Coltrane's solos is another delight. He does not take the song into a different direction, except for a more modern (1960s modern, that is) update. Tyner's unique block chord style, however, does give the enchanting song some unique aspects, as well as his moving solos.

Esperanza Spalding's Spanish version here is beautiful, but I can do without the scatting. She does a great job playing the song in 5/4 time but remains in the original key, soaring to great heights with her mesmerizing voice.

Thoughts on Angela Davis's Blues Legacies and Black Feminism

Angela Davis presents an articulately expressed text explaining the importance of women blues singers in developing an Afrocentric feminist epistemology that privileges the contributions of black women to blues music and black women’s activism.  Indeed, Davis interprets the lyrics of many blues compositions by Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday to offer evidence of this Afrocentric feminist epistemology that highlights the experiences of black women. Davis argues that the songs and lived experiences of these blues women emphasizes their sexual being and female sexuality, contains coded and explicit references to racial and economic oppression, celebrates the Southern and folk cultures of African Americans, and subverts bourgeois black attempts from the church or the middle-class to keep sexuality in the closet or the valorization of working-class black women. Davis also places the lives of these black women in a larger historical and social context to include Harlem, slavery, West African cultural retentions, the Great Migration, the conventions of white popular music, and white censorship of black music. She makes it quite clear that these three aforementioned blues women’s songs contain the lyrical content that represented a protest consciousness and politicized affirmations of working-class black women.

Part of Davis’s purpose of writing a book on the black feminism in blues singers is, like many feminist scholars, to challenge traditional narratives. In the case of blues, it is often thought of today as a masculine genre with a male guitarist. The truth is that the earliest, popular blues artists were women vocalists of the 1920s, particularly Bessie Smith, who was the “Empress of the Blues.” Ma Rainey was closer to the folk, or country blues, while Billie Holiday was a jazz singer Davis sees as coming from the blues tradition. Furthermore, she uses the notion of the aesthetic dimension to approach the lyrical content of artists such as Billie Holiday to support her argument for Billie’s feminist ethos, despite her song’s surface appearance supporting masochism. This, along with other sections of her text, is where her argument begins to fall into mostly conjecture and assumptions about how black audiences possibly interpreted the work of these singers. For instance, she claims that Billie’s ability to turn rather poor material into wonderful jazz songs meant that she invited audiences to interpret the lyrics in multiple ways, including race. However, there is no absolute evidence whatsoever that audiences listening to Billie Holiday sing torch songs, Tin Pan Alley or any other material were thinking the song was about racism or sexism in society. Thus, her performance of “You Let Me Down” does not mean that black listeners read into it the fact that white racist society “let us down” (170). To say so without any evidence from Black listeners is an assumption, though plausible, that Davis cannot support. She also claims that Holiday’s “songs were subversive in that they offered special and privileged insights to black people about the dominant culture” (171). She goes on to state that the rising black middle class was able to hear through Billie Holiday a note of warning for them to proceed with caution or lose their moorings and become culturally disorientated, without offering any shred of evidence (172). These broad generalizations and assumptions about how black audiences may have interpreted Billie Holiday’s music lack any evidence beyond Davis’s wishful thinking.

The earlier chapters of the text focusing on Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith are on much firmer ground. Since these earlier blues women were performing songs stemming from the black musical world and because the lyrics of many songs explicitly state or emphasize the themes Davis identifies with a black feminist ethos, her claims about Rainey and Smith become more believable. The numerous references to hoodoo and Southern black folklore, for instance, and lend credence to Davis’s comparison of Bessie Smith and Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston. Smith’s inclusion of numerous hoodoo allusions in her songs and the themes of disillusionment with the North appealed to working-class blacks while Hurston conducted ethnographic research and participated in the writing down of African American folk culture. Therefore, future generations may rethink Bessie Smith’s role in the Harlem Renaissance and African-American feminist history, particularly because during the time the intellectual elite of black males, such as Alain Locke, were opposed to blues and jazz as “high” art. Indeed, they saw anything that was not in accordance with developments in classical Western music as inferior art. These male writers and critics were also no fans of Hurston, whose legacy and role in the Harlem Renaissance has only recently been recognized.

Ultimately, Davis offers an interesting analysis of three great African-American women singers. Although not exactly activists in the traditional sense, at least two of them contributed to black feminism by undermining male control of the body, valorizing the lives of working-class black women, exerting sexual agency and openness to homosexuality, and fomenting a consciousness that subverted bourgeois and dominant cultural attitudes toward black womanhood. Though the section on Billie Holiday lacks sufficient evidence to make it convincing, Davis’s new perspective on Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey honors their central role as affirming black women of the 1920s. Her reevaluation of blues singers changes the history of blues music as not only a music of downtrodden men, but a genre born from an African American cultural milieu that includes social protest, resistance, and many women whose public sexuality, mobility, and pride cultivated an atmosphere conducive for the Civil Rights Movement. Thus, Davis refutes the assumptions of Oliver and Charters about apolitical blues. These women were writing songs about convict leasing, chain gangs, the 1927 Mississippi flood, and many other events directly relevant to the communities they performed for.

Also, if you don't already know, I have a long list of my favorite blues song which can be found here.

My Man/Mon Homme

Billie Holiday recorded "Mon Homme" multiple times in English. Of the recordings, her first with pianist Teddy Wilson remains the best. During this young period of her life, the 1930s, her voice was at it's peak and she was accompanied by one of the best bands of the 1930s. Moreover, the way she concludes this depressing, rather sexist song with such a happy, upbeat lilt is undeniably catchy. Despite all the problems and sacrifices she makes for this man, Lady Day sounds sincere and the uplifting tone of her ending verse emphasizes happiness. Much like the woman she describes in the song, Billie herself fell prey to many men who she devoted herself to but received little in return, contributing to her deteriorating state. After her verse, the listener is treated to a "cute" piano solo from Teddy Wilson that is delectable and then ending in a loud, bluesy way. Songs like "My Man" evince the reasons for Lady Day's popularity to this day: she lived the life these songs talked about. And it didn't hurt to have great sidemen to make the music swing. Listen here.

Edith Piaf's "Mon Homme" here, if you want to hear want the original French song sounds like. It lacks the jazzy swing Billie Holiday, so I am not a fan. However, if it had sounded closer to "C'est Si Bon" by Yves Montand, I would be all over this.

Strange Fruit

Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, two victims accused of killing a white man and raping his girlfriend in Marion, Indiana. There was no evidence of rape, and the woman herself said she wasn't raped. According to James Cameron, the only survivor of this lynching, and who would later found America's Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, the two men were robbing a white man but Cameron himself fled the scene before he died during the struggle. While Shipp and Smith were forced outside of the jailhouse and lynched, someone miraculously saved Cameron's life by announcing he had nothing to do with the crime. 

This powerful photograph likely influenced the writer of "Strange Fruit," a Jewish Communist. It also shows how lynchings were not a strictly southern phenomenon. It's also important to remember that his lynching occurred in 1930, only 81 years ago. 

"Strange Fruit" remains one of the most poetic anti-lynching/protest songs in American history. Though associated with Billie Holiday, the song's composer was a Jewish radical who penned it during the 1930s. Abel Meeropel would later set it to music under the name Lewis Allen and perform in New York City with is wife. Holiday only sang it for the first time at the Cafe Society, an integrated nightclub in Greenwich Village some years later. Then she recorded the song in 1939 for Commodore, a label company that was known for supporting alternative jazz.

The interesting thing about Holiday's recording is the lack of jazz or blues influences. Furthermore, many at the time only believed the record sold well because Holiday's amazing blues, "Fine and Mellow," was increasing sales. Needless to say, her record sold well and the song has forever been equated with Billie Holiday's powerful vocals (she recorded this song again for Verve and performed it live). I suppose the best way to describe her 1939 recording would be something akin to folk and hymns.

Josh White, a folk musician who had worked with Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and other early folk revivalists, would also record the song, accompanying himself on guitar. As one would expect, as a folk and blues musician, White's recording has more in common with those traditions than Holiday's version.

http://grooveshark.com/s/Strange+Fruit/3VC6TZ?src=5

Nina Simone also performed "Strange Fruit" with a very sparse arrangement (rather similar to her take on Black is the Color of My True Love's Hair).

Here is Billie Holiday's 1939 studio recording of "Fine and Mellow." This is probably her best blues.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/feb2002/frut-f08.shtml A good article on the history of the "Strange Fruit"