When Lady Day Chased The Blues Away, Again And Again-“Billie
Holiday: The First Verve Sessions ”-A CD Review
CD Review
By Music Critic Seth Garth
Billie Holiday: The First Verve (Record) Sessions, Billie
Holiday, Verve Records, Polygram, 1975
Everybody, at least the every bodies who came of age in the
1950s and 1960s, had at least heard the sad life story and junkie death of the
legendary blue singer Billie Holiday. Knew that information either from having
read her biography, the liner notes on her records (vinyl for those younger
readers who have not become hip to the beauties of that old-fashion way to
produce recordings in the current retro revival of that method), newspaper
obituaries, or from the 1970s film starring Diana Ross (lead singer of Motown’s
The Supremes). So everybody knew that Lady Day had come up the hard way, had
had a hard time with men in her life and had plenty of trouble with junk, with
heroin. Had turned her into some hustling gal with dark lights out of a Nelson
Algren story about her “daddy” making her blues go away, had the “fixer” man
making the pain going away for a moment. (I believe that the Prez, the great
saxophonist Lester Young who himself blew many a high white note out to the
China seas as the phrase went on the West Coast when he was “on” gave her that
name. Put lady and day together and it stuck. He backed her up on many
recordings, including here, and in many a venue, including New York café
society before they pulled her ticket. The name fit her as did that eternal
flower arrangement, sweet gardenia or some such flower speaking of sexual
adventures and promise, in her hair)
Yeah, that is the sad part, the life and times part. But if
you listen to this CD under review like the other compilations that I am
reviewing at this time while I am in a “from hunger” wanting habits mood about
Lady Day’s work like I get into every once in a while about music that moved,
moves, me, spoke, speaks, to me. If you listen through this CD or her classic
tunes for Verve Records you will also know why in the first part of the 21st
century guys like me are still reviewing her work, still haunted by that voice,
by that meaningful pause between notes that carried you to a different place,
by that slight hush as she enveloped a song which kept your own blues at bay. I
repeat kept your blues away whatever she suffered to bring that sentiment
forward.
That last statement, those last two sentences are really
what I want to hone in on here as I have previously done since Billie Holiday
is an acquired taste, and a taste which grows on you as you settle in to listen
to whole albums rather than a single selection spending half the night turning
over vinyl, flipping tapes, changing CDs if you don’t have multiple CD
recorder, or grabbing the dial on an MP3 player. Here is my god’s honest truth
though. Many a blue night when I was young, hell, now too, I would play Billie
for hours, tune that vinyl over in the beginning in my case, and my own silly
blues would kind of evaporate. Nice right.
Here is the not nice part, maybe better the not respectful
part for a sanctified woman’s voice and spirit.
Once a few years ago I was talking to some young people about Billie
and, maybe under the influence of the Diana Ross film or from their
disapproving parents, kind of wrote her off as just another junkie gone to
seed. When I was a kid, long before I acquired the Billie habit I had some
similar ideas about junk and junkies maybe under the influence of Frankie
Machine (played by Frank Sinatra) in the film adaptation of the voice of the
small people Nelson Algren’s The Man With
The Golden Arm. (The “golden arm” the amount of money spent with the “fixer
man” which singer/songwriter John Prine later mentioned in a lyric about “all
the money going into a hole in daddy’s arm” in the song Sam Sloan about the fate of a returning Vietnam veteran who
couldn’t face the “real” world after that experience.) The film seen and not totally understood then with my parents in
the early 1950s who warned me against the dangers of hanging with junkies and
getting hooked on dope. A real and present danger in the neighborhood we were
forced to live in where dope was around if a lot more discreetly and on the low
than now. It would take actually knowing guys, soldiers, friends, coming back
from Vietnam where via the Golden Triangle heroin, opium and such were cheap and
plentiful to have a more tolerant attitude toward that guys with a “habit”. A
couple of overdoses only added to the sense of loss. I shocked them, I think, and
maybe myself a little when I said if I had had the opportunity I would have given
Billie all the dope she wanted just for taking my own blues away.
That is why we still listen to that
sultry, slinky, sexy voice today.
Is everything in this CD or in her overall work the cat’s
meow. No, toward the end in the 1950s you can tell her voice was hanging by a
thread under the strain of all her troubles, legal and medical. But in the
1930sand 1940s, the time of her time, the time of her Verve recordings covering
Cole Porter, Gershwin and Jerome Kern songs with a little Johnny Mercer thrown
in, the time of Tin Pan Alley songs which seem to have almost been written just
for her she had that certain “it” which cannot be defined but only accepted,
accepted gratefully. Some of the versions of the songs here may be a little
more indicative of her high water mark than her later work where she teamed up
with serious jazz and blues players like the aforementioned Lester Young
blowing out high white notes to the China seas while she basked in the glow of
the lyrics. But just check out Blue Moon, Autumn In New York, Love For Sale and
Solitude and you will get an idea of what I am talking about. And as I have
stated repeatedly maybe get your own blues chased away
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