Billie Holiday

by John Szwed

  In those days 133rd Street was the real swing street, like 52nd Street later tried to be.

  Billie Holiday

  The idea of cabaret could mean different things in different parts of black America. In some cities, like Philadelphia, it involved the modest presentation of a singer or an exotic dancing group, a pianist or small band, or, in later years, a DJ. Such cabarets were presented only occasionally, were usually held above a bar or in an unrented building, and were advertised in the local neighborhood with handmade signs. During Prohibition, bootleg liquor was served, and after the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment they operated without a liquor license, the spirits having been bought at state liquor stores at full price and sold at even higher prices than those of local bars. The attraction was a community gathering in a relaxed atmosphere that avoided rougher crowds and the cold draft of a white nightclub or bar. In Harlem the impulse for cabarets was similar, but there it meant full-time clubs housed mostly in basements of brownstone residences that generally opened around midnight. The neighborhood also had a number of large nightclubs like Connie’s Inn and the Cotton Club, which presented the stars of black entertainment and which were owned by whites and “catered to the white trade.”

  The block of 133rd Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenues was the center of the uptown cabaret district. Places like the Nest, Tillie Fripp’s restaurant, the Clam House, Mexico’s, Basement Brownie’s, and Pod’s and Jerry’s offered an after-hours and literally underground basis for an alternative and more inclusive culture of freedom than that of the respectability proposed by the black middle class. Cabarets were welcoming gathering places for women, gays, those at different economic levels, as well as the people who lived close to the color line on either side, or crossed it. These nightspots and the way of life they represented and encouraged have been described as the other side of the Harlem Renaissance, another kind of racial uplift. It’s hard to imagine that such small venues could have significant influence beyond their neighborhoods, but through novels, poetry, music, newspapers, recordings, and occasional radio broadcasts of floor shows they presented a new kind of social and cultural reality, one that offered a forum for idiosyncratic people of great artistic and intellectual abilities who might otherwise never have found an audience or been able to influence the larger society. The cabarets were also points of attraction for white musicians, actors, literati, and high-society folk, many of whom became regulars and something more than mere slumming tourists and curiosity seekers. (Jazz trombonist Dickie Wells once said that the city could be divided into night people and day people. The difference between them was that the day people all wished they could be night people.) At the very least these white regulars could be a source of amusement (and money), and for some they even represented a hopeful sign that whites might be learning something from their visits.

  John Hammond Jr. was one of those regulars at the Harlem clubs and cabarets, often accompanied by his friends the Harlem painters Charles Alston and Romare Bearden. Hammond was a New York blue blood whose mother was a Vanderbilt and whose father was a successful business executive and a descendant of Civil War general John Henry Hammond. John Junior was an early convert and true believer in African American music and saw in it the potential to break the hold that race had on American life. He had the sort of bona fides that almost no other whites could claim: He was a member of the board of the NAACP; as a journalist, he had written about the injustices visited on black Americans in the courts, in work, and in music; and he regularly made donations to organizations that worked for social change, as well as to artists and musicians in need. He was also a man known to annoy some with his imperious, proprietorial manner, a tendency to at times take more credit than was warranted, and to presume to offer advice when it was not asked for. At the same time, his wealth and social position were often unfairly used against him, even though he devoted his life to music and gave up many of the privileges he could have had given his heritage (beginning with his removal from the social register for marrying beneath his level). He was one of the most important figures in the development of American music and perhaps did more than any other white individual in bringing African American music and musicians before the public.

  Hammond first heard Billie Holiday at Monette Moore’s club, a short-lived but well-attended spot named for its owner, a popular singer who had performed downtown and uptown and who at that time was an understudy for Ethel Waters. Hammond had located most of the places that sponsored black entertainment in New York City in his quest to find the best jazz musicians and blues singers. But when he first saw Billie perform at Monette’s, his whole horizon was widened: He declared her the best jazz singer he’d ever heard, raved about her to everyone he knew, hauled friends up to Harlem to hear her, and wrote about her in his column in the British music magazine Melody Maker.

  The young Benny Goodman was one of those Hammond took to see Billie, and her first recording, “Your Mother’s Son-in-Law,” was made under Goodman’s name with Hammond’s urging, and was produced by Hammond. Benny was still a freelance musician at the time, and it would be a few years before he led the swing band that made him famous. The recording session took place on November 27, 1933, only three days after Bessie Smith’s final recordings, another session arranged by Hammond, in Smith’s case to revive the career of his favorite blues singer. Billie was already nervous about working with a group of white musicians she didn’t know and facing a microphone for the first time, when she learned that her session followed one with Ethel Waters held in the studio that same day, and that she was being backed by the same band that had played for Waters. She performed “Your Mother’s Son-in-Law,” a novelty tune that was to appear shortly in Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1934, with a busy arrangement that was too fast and in a key that pitched her voice so high that it forced her to virtually shout over the band. Hammond continued to urge Benny to use her again, and she recorded with him almost a month later, this time on “Riffin’ the Scotch,” another novelty, a song based on a sort of musical pun, with the name of the liquor worked against some bagpipe clichés and a story line of a woman who has gotten rid of one bad man only to wind up with another. Most listeners don’t take this recording seriously, as it sounds as if it was thrown together that day in the studio by session musicians Goodman, Dick McDonough, and Buck Washington, with words added by Johnny Mercer, and was something Billie had to make the best of to be able to move on to a recording career. Yet it does show her at only eighteen already using what would become her signature sense of independent rhythm to find her way around the rigidity of the band. She was a swing singer among mostly white musicians who were yet finding their way into this new style of black music.

  In the depths of the Depression, the record business had shut down almost completely, so it was a year and a half before Hammond could find a way to get Billie back into the studio, and when he did it was with small bands under the leadership of pianist Teddy Wilson, another musician Hammond had been promoting. These recordings exist only because Hammond convinced the Brunswick Record Company that the newly perfected jukeboxes then being installed in neighborhood bars and restaurants featured no pop music that blacks wanted to hear. To guarantee that the records paid for themselves and that the company made at least some money, he organized recording sessions that cost no more than two hundred fifty to three hundred dollars by using only six or seven musicians and a singer, working without the cost of arrangements and rehearsals. From 1935 to 1942 this small-group business plan would produce some of the finest music that jazz has ever offered.

  While the recordings were made on the cheap, they were not jam sessions, if “jamming” meant musicians coming together to play something easy, or music that was somehow “natural” to them. The groups that Wilson put together were made up of some of the most accomplished jazz musicians of their time. The lineups varied from session to session, depending on who was in town, but the musicians all knew one an
other and shared a common musical vocabulary. Because all of them were already a part of an established musical tradition, they had a sense of form and procedure that allowed for the creation of “head” arrangements, something they could perform together without sheet music, advance preparation, or discussion.

  Wilson described these musicians as being aware of the importance of these sessions:

  The Teddy Wilson small group sessions were the only chance these men had to play with their peers instead of being the best of the whole band . . . The music that was produced was a rare monthly event—art for art’s sake . . . As far as Billie Holiday was concerned, she was very popular with musicians. You might call her a musicians’ singer, and she was in the company of soloists who were on a par with herself.

  In retrospect, the pairing of Teddy Wilson and Billie Holiday seems like an act of divine casting. Wilson’s elegance at the piano was not then the norm in jazz. His clean melodic lines and perfectly chosen and executed arpeggios complemented Billie’s lean song lines. He understood how to match his countermelodies to what she was singing and to fill in between her vocal lines to enhance the texture of the song. There was nothing facile or obvious about their interaction, and there was never a miscue. Wilson may have preferred a different quality of voice than Holiday’s, but that is never reflected in his playing. Within a year he would be accompanying Ella Fitzgerald and Helen Forrest.

  The critical and popular response to these recordings was largely positive, especially in Europe, where some of the most effusive praise for them was first published. (Hammond himself wrote his first appreciation of Holiday in Britain.) There were a few critics, however, who thought that Wilson and Holiday were a match only in that what they were creating was not hot jazz—bold, fast, impassioned music. Hugues Panassié, Europe’s most important jazz writer, said that Wilson had a finger style, with intelligent and well-exercised fingers, but that it was not a style of the heart. He had no respect at all for what he thought were Holiday’s strange melodic twists.

  Music publishers in the United States were likewise dissatisfied with Holiday’s singing, which posed a potential problem. In those days the source of most new songs for recording was the publishers, who brought them to record companies. For their purposes, vocals that departed too far from the written melody would be harder to sell, both because they could sound too strange for popular taste and because the recorded version of the songs would be different from that provided in the sheet music, which was then a big source of money from sales to amateur musicians and singers.

  It’s commonly believed that Billie Holiday was forced to sing songs that were not up to the level of her artistry, that she recorded whatever she could just to survive, or that as an African American singer she was given only the leftovers, the lightweight material, with the best songs going to white singers. But a survey of her entire output of recordings doesn’t support any of these beliefs. “A Sailboat in the Moonlight,” for example, was one of her songs that was considered fluff that had been rejected by the better singers. Written by John Jacob Loeb and Carmen Lombardo, the song was first recorded by Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians and reached number one on the Billboard Hit Parade by August 1937. Billie Holiday and Teddy Wilson went into the studio with it less than a month after Lombardo, and saxophonist Johnny Hodges also recorded it with Buddy Clark as the singer and members of the Duke Ellington band (including Ellington himself on piano) in the same month. The song itself may have been fluff, but rather than being a leftover, it seems to have been an obvious choice for those seeking at least some portion of commercial success. Listening to Lombardo’s hit version is essential to understanding what Holiday does with the song. She makes no concession to popular taste, departing far from the original melody, though she does keep the lyrics intact and understandable, silly though they may be. In fact, the clarity and precision of her enunciation of them is basic to what makes the piece work for her. She stresses the words “just” and “two,” makes the rhymes “setting” and “letting” and “drift” and “lift” ring against each other, and extends the “A” in “A chance to sail away” in the first chorus. Then, after putting stresses between the beats during her second appearance in the song, she hammers every syllable but the first on the beat in “A chance to drift for you to lift,” and then shouts the last line as if she were her own band taking the song out. Meanwhile, Lester Young has been constructing a tenor saxophone countermelody that enhances her singing and offers her touch points for response and new variations.

  If anything, most of the great singers have recorded weaker and more trivial songs than Holiday: Consider Frank Sinatra’s “Mama Will Bark,” Rosemary Clooney’s “Botch-a-Me,” Jo Stafford’s “Shrimp Boats,” or Ella Fitzgerald’s “My Wubba Dolly.” In fact, it was Ella, a more popular singer than Billie, who often had success with cheerful nonsense songs and juvenilia. “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” her 1938 hit with the Chick Webb band, was not even a pop composition, but a rural African American girls’ game song. Yet she had the look, the spirit of youth, that these pieces needed. Ella was the ingénue to Billie’s worldly sophisticate. She was the band singer the swing era folks wanted, even if Billie might have been the one they needed.

  “Good” jazz songs do not always make for great jazz. As Jelly Roll Morton, the man who claimed he invented jazz, put it, jazz is not in the songs themselves, but in how they are played or sung. When it was suggested to Morton that Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” was not the sort of material that was suitable for jazz, he objected: “You see, jazz is applied to the tune, and the quality must be in the operator . . .” Jazz was not a thing, in other words, but a method, a way of styling music. Nor was jazz about making trite or poor songs better. All jazz musicians work at making whatever music they are playing better, but they do so through recomposition, variation, invention, improvisation, and always aim for a new creation. Their approach is very different from that of classical singers or musicians, for whom the written score is paramount. The goal of classical musicians is to perform that score as well as possible in their own interpretation of it, but the score is always respected. Bad compositions, even those written by great composers, are not greatly improved by good musicians, and most classical musicians are not likely to try to improve them.

  Billie Holiday, like all great jazz musicians, was first and foremost an improviser and secondly an interpreter, and when a tune like “What a Little Moonlight Can Do” offered her little in the way of melody or lyrics, she compensated by detuning the melody, shifting the rhythmic accents around, and ignoring the moderato tempo indicated on the song’s original sheet music, taking it instead at a stompingly immoderate presto. “It’s Like Reaching for the Moon” is likewise a minor piece of songwriting, but a modest exercise in metaphysical pop poetry, a reaching for love. Holiday sings it in a key high enough to make her figuratively look upward, and lets words like “stars” fall while she extends the word “reach” out into musical space. She is accompanied by Johnny Hodges and Harry Carney, two of Ellington’s long-term colleagues, musicians who improvise contrasting flurries of notes behind her elongated and spatial lines. It’s a vocal that is also interesting for her rare use of intense vibrato, here stretched to the point of the tremulous.

  In July 1936 John Hammond’s role as producer of the Wilson-Holiday recordings passed in large part to Bernie Hanighen, a young man from Nebraska and a graduate of Harvard, where he had led his own band, written songs and musicals, and, like Hammond when he was attending Yale, spent his weekends in the cabarets of Harlem. Under Hanighen, Holiday continued in much the same musical context but she was now recording for Vocalion Records, one of the many subsidiaries that the American Record Corporation (later to become Columbia Records) owned or leased. But he gave Billie more time to sing on each record, bringing her vocal in earlier on each track, followed by the musician’s solos, then having her return to reprise the song just before the ending. He doubled he
r pay and put her name on the record as a leader for the first time, even though her role in picking songs and musicians remained the same.

  “No Regrets,” recorded at their first session together on July 10, 1936, showed her work continuing at the same high level under her new producer. This song was almost a cheerful farewell to a love affair, their education being worth the price it cost. Billie projects the image of a woman leaving in broad daylight, sashaying out the door with nothing broken, pride intact. Artie Shaw and Bunny Berigan play brilliantly alongside her, clarinet and trumpet winding together in a duo with the joyous spirit of young white musicians discovering black jazz. (“No Regrets” makes for a fascinating parallel with Édith Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien.” The Little Sparrow’s interpretation is in the spirit of an MGM production, more appropriate to a scene of her riding out of Algeria with the French Foreign Legion, defeated, but her arm raised in a salute of both farewell and independence.)

  That same initial session with Hanighen is also notable for producing the first nonoperatic recording of a song from George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, a show that had closed on Broadway only a few months earlier and was still mired in controversy. An opera about rural black people, written by a Southern aristocrat and two songwriters with ties to Tin Pan Alley, staged entirely by white people, was slated from the start for trouble. No one could be entirely dispassionate about it unless he or she was not an American. The lines of dissension were not drawn so neatly as white vs. black. There were those on either side of the racial divide who liked it or argued vehemently against it, and there was a high vs. low cultural split as well. George Gershwin described it as a folk opera, but it did not feature any folk songs. Some people didn’t even consider it an opera: How could a pop songwriter compose an opera? What could a white man know about black folks? And that degrading libretto in dialect!