Billie Holiday (17 page)

Of all the songs that Holiday recomposed as she sang, none is more radically reconceived than “I'll Get By” (recorded May 11, 1937). The original melody (stated loosely by Johnny Hodges's saxophone at the beginning of the record and at the end by Buck Clayton on trumpet) is interesting on its own, rising and falling and yet moving with the inevitability of the pull of musical gravity. While it's not surprising that she decides to flatten the song out, given her customary musical methodology, as Gunther Schuller points out, when she reduces the melody's range by repeating the same note (A) twenty-six times, she “performs major surgery” on the song, to the point that it becomes overbearing. It is an extreme example of her mode of operation, and made to seem all the more so when Teddy Wilson follows her with a graceful and shapely melodic invention of his own. But the British trumpeter and jazz writer Humphrey Lyttelton hears something different in her invention. He quotes the jazz trombonist Benny Morton as noting that Billie is “turning the melody line upside down.” Instead of starting on the lower F of the song (“I'll”) and rising to a high A (“I”), she starts on the high A and drops downward. On the repetition of the original chorus she does the
same with the word “poverty,” only dropping from the A to an E on the third syllable instead of an F, which would be expected in the written original of the song, which was set in the key of F major. While she admittedly limits herself to a six-note range and does repeat a single note twenty-six times, she does so in the context of a daring and fascinating reinvention of the song. (For a “straight” rendering of the original, hear the Ink Spots' 1944 version, which was released during World War II and became a hit.)

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“Things Are Looking Up” (November 1, 1937) is another of Holiday's favorites among her own recordings, and rightly so. The original version of the Gershwins' song from the 1937 film
A
Damsel in Distress
as sung by Fred Astaire (or even Ella Fitzgerald's later recording from 1959) seems lackluster and unconvincing, even at its jaunty tempos, in comparison to Billie's version. Singing at a more relaxed tempo, she reworks the melody throughout the song and produces one of her most optimistic (though perhaps guardedly so) recordings.

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“Back in Your Own Backyard” (January 12, 1938) was a 1928 song associated with Al Jolson and Billy Rose, a sentimental piece that could have been written in the late nineteenth century. Despite its positive message, its melody tilts toward the melancholy, and most of the singers who recorded it performed it that way. For the Holiday up-tempo version, Buck Clayton bugles the introduction, which leads to a dead stop, at which point Billie picks up his lead and floats into the words.
She avoids the birdcall-like dips in the original melody and focuses on small touches that subtly change the rhythm: the stresses on the second syllables of “feather,” “waiting,” and “under,” or her pointed emphasis on “back” in the final lines of the song.
All the while she is phrasing across the beat, resisting the obvious, until she reaches the bridge, where she stresses every word of “weary at heart” directly on the beat, engaging briefly with
the swing of the rhythm section. Lester Young's solo that follows is one of his best, and, despite its brevity, full of surprises.

With Count Basie

When John Hammond first heard the Count Basie band, it was a revelation. The Basie players were very different from Eastern jazz bands: Much of their music was based on the blues, and they had a remarkable singer in Jimmy Rushing, though Hammond thought the vocals were secondary to the remarkable dance music they brought with them from the Midwest. Their rhythm section had a lighter, more even, and propulsive feel that was the envy of every band that heard them (Benny Goodman, especially, favored the swing they generated); the ensemble was strong and brassy; they had the ability to create spontaneous arrangements based on collective experience; and their use of riffs and call-and-response was state of the art. It was music of urban sophistication that still retained a feel for the blues.

Hammond immediately wanted to sign the Basie band to a recording contract, but discovered they had already been signed by Decca. He did, however, manage to get part of the band recorded in 1936 (under the name Jones-Smith Incorporated) a few months before Decca could get the full outfit's records out. When the Basie band came to New York in 1937, Hammond acted as their adviser, working closely with their manager Willard Alexander.

Hammond brought Holiday and Count Basie together, knowing that she had already recorded with Basie's rhythm section and his star musicians Lester Young, Buck Clayton, and Herschel Evans on some of the Teddy Wilson sessions, and that she preferred to work with them, especially with Lester Young. Basie later added her as a band singer, but performing very different material from Jimmy Rushing's blues. When Basie played the Apollo Theater, it was his two vocalists who caught the audience's fancy.

Billie fit in just fine as “one of the boys,” gambling, cursing, drinking, and laughing with them, but there was more to her than that. She was the
rare singer who didn't need arrangements and could find her way through whatever they were playing. Since much of what they did play was worked out collectively, sometimes in the moment, they appreciated her good ear as well as her voice. Saxophonist
Preston Love said that she always listened closely to the band and inspired them when she'd turn away from the mic, partly facing them, and compliment individual musicians on their solos. It was a Lady-like thing to do, and very different from the behavior of a typical band's trophy singers.

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As the Basie group's reputation grew in New York, so did Holiday's, and it was ordained that they would have to compete sooner or later with the Savoy Ballroom's house favorite, the Chick Webb band and their singer, Ella Fitzgerald. The showdown came on January 16, 1938, when the Savoy sponsored a battle of the bands. The ballroom was packed with celebrities, especially those from the music world, which included most of Benny Goodman's band, Duke Ellington, a dozen other bandleaders, and singers such as Mildred Bailey and Ivie Anderson. The
New York Amsterdam News
described it pugilistically: “Ella
Fitzgerald, entering the microphonic arena in white fighting togs, held a ‘Bei Mir Bist du Schoen' advantage over the blue-clad Billie, and unlike her boss, the Chick, played a confident defensive game. On the other hand, Billie, the Holiday girl, in the pink throughout the battle, threw her notes at Queen Ella in grand fashion.” Ella sang “Loch Lomond” and Billie sang “My Man.” When the ballots were counted, Ella had won the audience by three to one. Even so, the publicity the event received earned the Basie group and Billie new opportunities to record. But Holiday was now under contract to Vocalion Records, and that prevented her from recording together with the band on Decca.

Only three songs exist from her days with Basie, live recordings from two dance halls in 1937, the Savoy in New York and the Meadowbrook in New Jersey. “They Can't Take That Away from Me” shows how quickly she adapted comfortably to big band accompaniment, gliding over rhythm
suspensions and finding her own way over the glassine 4/4 of a great swing rhythm section. What impresses most, though, is the way she changes the emphases on the simplest words—“you,” “hold,” “never”—as if she's phrasing from word to word. On the up-tempo “Swing, Brother, Swing” she rides high over the band like a lead trumpet player, aggressively punctuating and echoing the rhythm below. “I Can't Get Started with You” is the least successful, a very popular song of the day with which she never quite seemed comfortable, perhaps because of its wordiness. What saves this recording are the moments when she and Lester Young's tenor saxophone are both staying true to the melody, not really improvising but each interpreting it in his or her own way simultaneously.

It was at this moment of its peaking popularity that Billie left the band. Her explanation was that there were too many managers running the band, so she quit. Others said that she was fired for refusing to sing the blues, and that John Hammond had asked Basie to drop her. That seems unlikely, as Hammond was the person who had asked Basie to hire her, and he knew she seldom sang blues; in any case, Jimmy Rushing was the established star blues singer with the band. Basie said Billie quit because she could make more money on her own. The final account of her departure came from Willard Alexander, who said that Hammond had not been responsible for her firing, and in fact if it hadn't been for his intervention on her behalf, she would have been gone six months earlier. “
The reason for her dismissal,” he said, “was strictly one of deportment, which was unsatisfactory, and a distinctly wrong attitude toward her work. Billie sang fine when she felt like it. . . . We just couldn't count on her for consistent performance.” Basie replaced her with Helen Humes, a lively and cheerful singer, closer in style to Ethel Waters, Mildred Bailey, and Ella Fitzgerald, but Jimmy Rushing continued to get most of the blues songs, leaving Humes with the ballads.

With Artie Shaw

When he arrived in New York, Artie Shaw was a saxophonist and clarinetist with a good reputation and great ambition. He had established
himself in the Midwest but was now ready for bigger things, though he was obliged to wait for six months before he could get his Musicians Union card to be able to work. To while away the time, he began wandering in Harlem in search of the kind of black jazz he had heard only on records. While standing outside the door of Pod's and Jerry's one night, he heard piano playing that was so alien to what he knew, and yet so appealing in its mix of freedom and sense of form, that he began returning to stand in front and listen night after night. On one of his trips back to the same spot, he met the pianist at the door—Willie “The Lion” Smith—and the two of them struck up a friendship. They toured the Harlem nightspots, meeting people, sitting in, swapping ideas, and Artie joined Smith to play at Pod's and Jerry's every night for free as his apprentice. (
Shaw wrote a short story about that experience called “Snow White in Harlem,” and the Lion wrote about Artie in his book
Music on My Mind
.)

The club was in the process of evolving from a place of half-empty seats and candlelight (when management couldn't pay the electric bills) to a first-stop-after-midnight gathering place for musicians and celebrities from the theater. The regulars among the musicians were Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, the Dorsey Brothers, and Tiny Bradshaw, and the celebrities included Mae West, Joan Crawford, Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, naughty singer Gladys Bentley, Moms Mabley, and Mayor Jimmy Walker. It was there that Shaw first saw Billie. Timme Rosenkrantz was present one night and described the fried chicken and biscuits, the bad whiskey, the customers (Paul Whiteman, Mildred Bailey, and Joe Venuti), and his own discovery of Billie:

In a corner sat a distinguished-looking fellow with a big cigar clenched solidly between his teeth, flailing the hell out of an upright piano. Willie “the Lion” Smith! . . . Then came the copper-colored beauty, Billie Holiday, wearing a white gardenia in her hair to frame her lovely face. Instantly the room fell as quiet as falling snow, as Billie lifted a voice that was the embodiment of her strange beauty . . . Willie “the Lion” was a knowing and
masterful accompanist. He offset the lush brutality of Billie's songs that night with his happy stride piano.

Shaw soon found a job playing behind her in a group put together by her new producer, Bernie Hanighen. Artie had no interest in “girl singers” or “boy singers,” as they were then known, and regarded them as commercial necessities at best, but Holiday was clearly something special. He told her he would have a band one day and she would sing with him when he did. She took it as just more flattery, which she had heard plenty of from white guys even before she was known outside of Harlem.

But Shaw would not become a typical bandleader. He was exceedingly well self-educated, an intellectual with no interest in doing the same thing night after night, the first prerequisite of popular stardom. In fact, over the years he seemed to be trying to do everything he could to avoid what he had to do to be a commercial success. He began playing classical music, which brought both the jazz and classical fans down on him (each for different reasons), had musical arrangements written for him by the African American classical composer William Grant Still, flirted with bebop, and briefly crossed into Cuban and Mexican popular music. He also had a wicked sense of musical humor that usually passed over the heads of his audiences: Shaw's recording of “Dancing in the Dark” ended over the closing chords of Stravinsky's “The Firebird.” His faux classical “Concerto for Clarinet” had a
doina
slipped into the middle, and whether his source for this folk dance music was Béla Bartók's Romanian field recordings or Lower East Side weddings he had witnessed in his youth, it was a daring ploy.

Shaw wanted to launch a new band with Billie because he believed she was better than any singer he had ever heard. When he learned that she had left Count Basie's band, he immediately drove through the night from Boston to her mother's place in New York to ask her to join his outfit. Artie knew how fine she sang, but when he told others about her he didn't point to her recordings to prove it. Instead, like Professor Ralph Kirkpatrick, he said, “
I gave her a record of Debussy's ‘L'après-midi d'un
faune.' She could sing the whole thing, the top line: ‘Da, da-da-da-da-da-da
dee
—She could
do
the whole thing. Didn't have the range for it—but she had a
very
good ear.” (It must have meant as much to her as it did to him: She still had the recording until she died, and often played it for guests.)