*Jazz Days On My Mind- The Music Of Mildred Bailey

Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip Of Mildred Bailey Performing "Rocking Chair".

CD Review

Thanks For The Memories: Mildred Bailey, Giants Of Jazz, 1996

Musically, I am a blues man. I am informed, malformed, deformed, reformed by the blues. Then I am a rock man. And a folk man, in all its variants. So where doe that lead me into an exposition of jazz that I have recently started to write more about in this space. Well, let’s just call it an extension of the blues (not hard to do by the way). And the clearest example of that is Lady Day, Billie Holiday. Yes, I know that she was a jazz singer extraordinaire. But, the way she swept my blues away when I was down in the dumps sure makes me think she was the queen of the blues (Bessie Smith being, of course, outlandishly the “Empress”).

All of this is by a very round about way of bringing the jazz singer under review, Mildred Bailey into the picture. Billie Holiday set the standard in the 1940’s (and to a lesser extent in the 1950’s when the dope started to get the best of her) for the phrasing of a jazz song, for the hush that signaled a new direction to the song, for the … well, underlying sense of the song. For that something unsayable but certainly knowable when a song is done right. Mildred Bailey and others (who will be highlighted here later) had that in spots and that is why she and this “greatest hits’ compilation of her work are being reviewed here.

So what sticks out here in that regard? How about her rendition of Duke Ellington’s “I Didn’t Know About You”. Or King Oliver’s “’Taint What You Do”. Or, for that matter, Crosby’s “ A Ghost Of A Chance”. And, of course, “Gulf Coast Blues”. Finally, though, let us see why she is a cut below Billie and Bessie- “St Louis Blues”. That is the cut line. But she still is good. Listen up.