The History of Jazz (38 page)

In 1933, John Hammond heard Holiday singing in a Harlem nightspot and gave her career a boost with a glowing review in
Melody Maker
, heralding her as a “real find” and confiding that the eighteen-year-old vocalist “sings as well as anybody I ever heard.” Later that year, Hammond arranged for Holiday to sing with Benny Goodman. Other opportunities followed: a brief film appearance in
Symphony in Black
(alongside Duke Ellington), a booking at the Apollo Theater, and more recordings (this time under Teddy Wilson’s leadership) arranged by Hammond. During the remaining years of the decade, Holiday would make dozens of small-combo sides, resulting in many of the finest works of her career. Even before her pairing with Lester Young, Holiday made her mark with classic renditions of “What a Little Moonlight Can Do,” “These Foolish Things,” “I Cried for You,” “Billie’s Blues,” “A Fine Romance,” and “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love,” among others. The soloists on these performances included some of the finest horn players in jazz (Benny Goodman, Ben Webster, Johnny Hodges, Harry Carney), but with the addition of Lester Young for a January 1937 session, Holiday found an even more sympathetic partner. Virtually all of the Holiday-Young sides are of lasting value. Even when burdened with a banal tune or awkward lyric—“Now They Call It Swing,” “Me, Myself and I Are All in Love with You,” “You’re Just a No Account,” “Sun Showers”—Holiday and Young were still able to create music of near perfection. And when working with stronger material—“All of Me,” “Foolin’ Myself,” “Mean to Me,” “He’s Funny That Way,” and “This Year’s Kisses”—they left behind definitive performances that cast a long shadow over later attempts to interpret these songs.

This same period saw Holiday slowly gain a following beyond the inner circle of jazz cognoscenti. Short stints with Count Basie and Artie Shaw broadened her audience, while Holiday’s 1939 recording of “Strange Fruit,” a disturbing song about a lynching, added to her notoriety and imparted a piquant political quality to her public image. This shift was spurred at the behest of Barney Josephson, a former shoe salesman who had recently opened Cafe Society, a fashionable nightclub in the Village. Josephson had introduced the song to Holiday and encouraged her to close each set with it. Over the next several years, Holiday gradually became less a jazz vocalist and more a torch singer. Her most characteristic works from this period were moody numbers such as “Lover Man,” “I Cover the Waterfront,” “God Bless the Child,” “Good Morning Heartache,” “Don’t Explain,” and the aforementioned “Strange Fruit.” Billie’s singing still exuded intense emotional commitment but, as the decade progressed, the quality of her sidemen steadily declined, and later her voice followed suit. By the middle of the 1940s, subpar jazz players or maudlin violins had replaced the all-star bands of earlier years.

The travails of Holiday’s personal life also became increasingly public during this period. Starting from her Baltimore days, Holiday had veered from the straight and narrow. Before her fifteenth birthday she was smoking tobacco—in time her habit would require fifty cigarettes per day—and marijuana. In her teens she worked in a brothel (and later shocked many readers with a candid account in her 1956 autobiography). Holiday also came to drink heavily. Some years later, her husband Jimmy Monroe introduced Holiday to heroin. Her ensuing addiction led to a series of problems with law enforcement agencies in the late 1940s. In 1947, she was forced to serve ten months at the Federal Reformatory for Women in West Virginia. But even after her release, Holiday continued to pay a heavy price. She could no longer work in New York clubs because of a regulation (eventually repealed in 1967) that denied cabaret cards to convicted felons. Allowed to perform at theaters and auditoriums, Holiday was presented at a successful concert at Carnegie Hall, but a follow-up “Holiday on Broadway” engagement at the Mansfield Theater folded after five days. Barred from nightclubs, Holiday was essentially prevented from earning a living in New York. Even in other locales, Holiday found club owners reluctant to book her, either because of the stigma of her addiction or a reputation for unreliability. In 1949, Holiday was arrested again on drug charges while touring the West Coast but was acquitted when she convinced the jury that she had been set up by her companion John Levy. Sales and airplay of her recordings declined during this period as well, and in 1951 Decca refused to renew Holiday’s contract. A
Downbeat
reviewer smugly joked that Lady Day was becoming “Lady Yesterday.”

In March 1952, Holiday signed with Norman Granz’s Verve label and began the arduous process of rehabilitating her career as a jazz singer. Over the next five years, she would record over a hundred songs for Granz, once again in the company of world-class jazz musicians. These included many of the finest saxophonists in jazz, albeit ones who played in a prebop style—Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Benny Carter, Willie Smith, Flip Phillips, Paul Quinichette—along with such trumpeters as Harry “Sweets” Edison, Charlie Shavers, or Joe Newman. On piano Holiday was supported by Oscar Peterson, Jimmy Rowles, or Wynton Kelly, all toptier musicians. In sidemen, in material, in style, Granz was attempting to recreate the formula that had worked so well for Holiday during the prewar years. Often she recorded the same songs with which she had made her reputation some two decades earlier.

But Holiday’s voice had changed. In the opinion of some it had declined precipitously. The value of Holiday’s late recordings remains a matter of debate among jazz fans. Her voice clearly showed the signs of strain, of wear. A darker quality now pervades the music; at times, a sense of despair infuses the performances. A streak of melancholy had always characterized Holiday’s singing, but by now the touches of light were all but extinguished. Yet a trade-off was apparent. The deterioration in Holiday’s vocal equipment was compensated for by even more nuanced performances. Holiday’s phrasing, her timing, her ability to add chiaroscuro shades of meaning to a lyric remain unsurpassed on these late-vintage recordings. And if Holiday could be a subpar vocalist, she was never an indifferent one. Miles Davis, in an oft-quoted assessment offered to Nat Hentoff in 1958, remarked on the greater maturity in Holiday’s singing. “You know, she’s not thinking now what she was in 1937, and she’s probably learned more about different things. And she still has control, probably more control than then. No, I don’t think she’s in a decline.” Altoist Jackie McLean, recalling this period in Holiday’s career, explained: “Her voice was just a shadow of what it had been, yet she still put a song over. Her singing voice was gone, leaving emotion her only tool of expression.”
¹⁰

Holiday continued to struggle with heroin addiction and bouts of heavy drinking during these final years. In 1956, she was again arrested on a narcotics charge, this time in Philadelphia. But Holiday’s self-assertiveness came to the fore that same year with activities on a wide range of fronts: her autobiography was published by Doubleday; she performed to an enthusiastic audience at Carnegie Hall, and extracts from the book were narrated as part of the evening’s entertainment; she continued to record and earn large fees for nightclub dates. The next year Holiday appeared on a television show,
The Sound of Jazz
, fronting a superb band that also reunited her with Lester Young, and delivered a finely etched performance of “Fine and Mellow.” It is often cited, with justification, as the most moving jazz moment ever captured on film.

Ultimately, physical dissipation, rather than artistic exhaustion, took its toll. Although beset by heart and liver problems, Holiday maintained an extensive touring schedule, including overseas appearances. At a Greenwich Village concert in May 1959, she had to be helped from the stage after singing only two numbers. A week later she fell into a coma. At the hospital Holiday showed signs of recovery, slowly regaining weight and beginning to dictate sections of a new book to her collaborator, Bill Dufty. Her legal problems, however, pursued her even into the hospital ward, with the police claiming that she was in possession of heroin and putting her under house arrest, going so far as to post agents outside the door of her room. Although Holiday responded to treatment for her liver, a kidney infection set in, and on July 17 she died. At the time of her death, Holiday’s bank account showed a balance of only 70 cents, but hospital workers who came to take the body found $750 taped to one of her legs—an instinctive gesture of self-preservation by one who, so often betrayed by those closest to her, had come to trust only in herself.

DUKE ELLINGTON: MIDDLE PERIOD AND LATER WORKS

Duke Ellington would eventually benefit from the rising public interest in swing music generated by Goodman’s success. Even so, the birth of the Swing Era came at a time when Ellington was increasingly distancing himself from the mass-market demands of the music industry. At a point when jazz was becoming America’s popular music, Ellington appeared singularly intent on transforming it into a serious art form. If there was any irony inherent in this situation, Ellington seemed blissfully unaware of it. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this iconic figure during the heyday of the big bands was that, whatever conflicts there may have been between the demands of commerce and the higher aspirations of his muse, they forced few compromises in his music. Nowhere was Ellington’s genius more evident than in this ability—ever so rare in any idiom, but especially in the jazz world—to achieve simultaneously the highest rung of artistic achievement and remain a celebrated mass-market entertainer.

Yet Ellington never made it too easy for his audience. His music was laced with dissonances. His melodies were rarely hummable ditties (and could give even trained singers fits with their odd intervallic leaps). While most bandleaders featured a heavy dose of popular songs in their repertoires, Ellington relied to an extreme on his own pieces. True, Duke could compose hits, but these represented a tiny proportion of the band’s output, dwarfed by the extended works, tone poems, ambitious pieces of program music, miniconcertos for his soloists, novelty numbers, blues, reconfigured evocations of stride or New Orleans style, and experimental compositions of various sorts. Sometimes these forays into new territory would produce an unexpected hit—as happened with the Middle Eastern–tinged “Caravan,” Juan Tizol’s contribution to the band from 1937. But more often, audiences were left to grope as best they could with a “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue” or a “Reminiscing in Tempo.” And even when Ellington offered a toe-tapping “swing” number, increasingly popular with audiences during this period, he rarely gave them the simple riff-based workhorses that other bands rode to success. Indeed, the riff—in essence, a repeated motif over changing harmonies, sometimes given a syncopated kick through a displacement caused by a contrast between the length of the phrase and the underlying meter—may have been the undisputed musical signature of the era (as witnessed by the success of “Opus One,” “In the Mood,” “A String of Pearls,” “Flying Home,” and other like numbers), but apparently no one had told Ellington. Instead, he challenged his fans with complex swing charts such as “Cotton Tail” or “Braggin’ in Brass”—clearly two masterpieces of the genre, but the former dauntingly hard to sing along with, the latter impossible. Today, Ellington’s conservative works in AABA song form are the best known, the most frequently recorded pieces in his oeuvre, but these represent only one facet of his complex musical personality. Ellington himself was always quick to emphasize his cavalier attitude to these pop song offerings: “Solitude,” he claimed, was written in twenty minutes when he needed another number to finish a recording session; “In a Sentimental Mood,” he explained, was tossed off to calm down a party veering out of control one night in Durham, North Carolina. Who could doubt that, at the crest of the public’s craze for big band music, Ellington remained a reluctant participant in the mainstreaming of hot jazz?

In 1936, with swing sweeping the country, Ellington recorded little and had no hits. That same year, his group fell to fifth place in the
Metronome
poll. Dozens of big bands were being formed around the country, but Ellington responded at the close of the year by initiating a series of combo recordings. Over the next two years, Ellington would be involved in making over sixty small-group sides, but only one—Johnny Hodges’s performance on “Jeep’s Blues”—became a featured jukebox number. In 1937, Ellington continued to take the high road with his big band work, recording the ambitious “Diminuendo in Blue” and “Crescendo in Blue,” companion pieces that filled both sides of a 78. His biggest-selling release of the year, however, was the previously mentioned “Caravan,” an exotic piece with modal overtones that few bandleaders would have considered to be hit material.

This apparent lull in the larger band’s activity was deceptive. The Ellington orchestra, with its leader now approaching his fortieth birthday, was on the brink of its greatest period, a burst of creativity that would last until the recording ban of the war years. True, Ellington would continue to record outstanding material for the remainder of his life, but the sheer number of masterpieces produced by the band between 1938 and 1942 stands out even in the context of Duke’s half-century career. Three additions to the band at the close of the decade—Billy Strayhorn, Ben Webster, and Jimmy Blanton—would contribute greatly to this explosion of artistry. But even before their arrival, Ellington was already increasing his output, both in quantity and quality. The year 1938 saw the band produce a number of classic sides. “Steppin’ into Swing Society,” the group’s first recording of the year, set the tone for Ellington’s growing focus on medium-tempo swing charts, another trademark sound of the era. A similar groove is evident on a number of outstanding 1938 tracks, most notably on the two features for Ellington’s best brass soloists: “Riding on a Blue Note,” a jaunty showpiece for trumpeter Cootie Williams, and “Boy Meets Horn,” a memorable Rex Stewart performance that demonstrated Ellington’s ability to extract depths of emotion from a simple device, in this instance a half-valve effect on the cornet. Extremely fast virtuoso performances had never played a large role in the Ellington book, but with “Braggin’ in Brass” Ellington created a classic of the genre, a breathtaking chart stunningly executed by the band. These ventures into unadulterated swing did not prevent Ellington from continuing to develop his “mood” style. The band achieved especially memorable results on “Blue Light,” “Lost in Meditation,” “Prelude to a Kiss,” and “A Gypsy without a Song.” As these performances made clear, Ellington was increasingly able to incorporate a wide array of stylistic devices into his mood pieces—plaintive blues calls, impressionistic harmonies, elements of romantic ballads—without destroying the overall unity of the performance. This ability to cover so much musical ground in a three-minute song (reminiscent of Jelly Roll Morton’s best efforts) would stand out as one of the most salient virtues of Ellington’s mature work.