When Lady Day Chased The Blues Away, Again And Again-“The
Quintessential Billie Holiday (Volume 1-1933-1935)”-A CD Review
CD Review
By Seth Garth
The Quintessential Billie Holiday, Volume 1, 1933-1935,
[Sometimes I get in a Nelson Algren moment as here. But that
I mean I want to get down in the mud, get back to the roots, talk about the
days when it was not clear which way I was heading-a life of crime or its
cousin reading and writing to try to make sense of the world (just kidding on
the cousin part, okay so avoid a tweet storm please). Want to talk about the
blues since I am here reviewing a Lady Day, Billie Holiday of the orchid-ripped
hair. Want to talk about the people like Billie who lived on the edge, who fell
down, who got back up and fell down again. Yeah, the ones Nelson Algren he of
the Walk On The Wild Side, Man With The
Golden Arm talked about, the Frank Machines, the Dove Linkhorns, the people
I came from if the truth be told.
I swear I don’t to this day understand what those people I
talked to several years ago that I noted below who wrote Billie off as some
long-gone junkie of no account. Not after she saved many a day for me when I
was blue, maybe beyond blue, maybe ready to meet the dawn turned into night, if
you really want to know. See even a stone-cold junkie has the capacity to give
something-if she or he has some talent. But here is what the squares and by
that I include those dunces who dismissed Billie out of hand, didn’t want to
hear how she “saved” me on many a misbegotten tough day or estimate, fathom
what pain she had to endure to give what she could give. Maybe some people have
become so sanitized, so vanilla they know not of what I speak when I talks
about Lester Young blowing that seldom attained high white note every
instrumentalist seeks out to the damn China Seas. Don’t know what it took even
on good days for Billie to run the rack, to pick up her head long enough to do
what she had to. Who gives a fuck, the old corner boy from the hard-pressed
Acre section of downtrodden North Adamsville coming out with that fuck word,
whether she needed the fixer man to come and get her well when you think about
it for a minute. Yeah, no wait let me go and listen to about two hours of
Billie rather than slip into a blue funk and forget that Nelson Algren spoke
for the little voiceless people who knew their Billie backward and forward.
Knew her junkie pain, needed their own fixer man to get well.
For the record I will say it here again today-if I had had
the capacity to do so I would have provided Billie with all the dope she
needed-be her every loving fixer man just so she could chase my weary blues
away. That’s the ticket. The hell with the squares. S.G.]
Everybody, that meaning everybody who knows anything about the
blues knows of legendary blue singer Billie Holiday. Knew she was tied up hard
with junkie fever, knee deep in junk. Knew that information either from having
read her biography, the liner notes on her records (vinyl for those who have
not become hip to the beauties of that old-fashion way to produce recordings in
the recent retro revival of that method), newspaper obituaries, or from the
1970s film starring Diana Ross (lead singer of Motown’s 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
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 ones in this series and 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 me, spoke to me. In this second volume in the series 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 envelopes 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 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 a 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 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. I shocked them, I think, 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
1930s, the time of her time, 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. This first may
be a little more uneven that her later work when 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 Miss Brown To You, What a
Little Moonlight Can Do, and the classic Sunbonnet Blue and you will get an idea of what I am talking about.
And maybe get your own blues chased away
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