[Dixielandjazz] Billie Holiday at 100: Concerts, Musicians Honor Singing Legend

[Robert Ringwald]

I know I’m committing harracy but I’ve never been a fan of Billie Holiday. Her phrasing and singing behind the beat makes me uncomfortable. 

-Bob Ringwald, ducking for cover...


Billie Holiday at 100: Concerts, Musicians Honor Singing Legend


by Andrew Gilbert

San Jose Mercury News, July 2, 2015


Why is it so hard to take measure of Billie Holiday? On April 7, the occasion of her 100th birthday, numerous articles surfaced on the Internet assessing the jazz legend’s legacy. Far too many missed the mark, focusing more on her troubles than her sublime music.


Second only to Louis Armstrong as a foundational figure in jazz vocals, Holiday wielded her voice like an improvising horn player, imbuing Tin Pan Alley lyrics with infinite gradations of longing, desire, pain and bliss. Her graceful and poised pas de deux with consummate musicians such as pianist Teddy Wilson, trumpeter Buck Clayton, and particularly tenor saxophonist Lester Young (who famously dubbed her Lady Day) set a still unsurpassed standard for vocalist/instrumentalist interplay.


>From her first recordings in 1933 at the age of 18 with a studio band led by a then-unknown clarinetist named Benny Goodman to her last sessions with the Ray Ellis Orchestra, three months before her death in 1959 at the age of 44, she helped define the American Songbook’s parameters, turning numerous tunes into standards. And she had a hand in writing several standards herself, including “God Bless the Child,” “Fine and Mellow” and “Don’t Explain.”


Far beyond jazz’s ken, she forced America to confront its most disturbing legacy, evidencing uncommon bravery in recording and insistently performing the anti-lynching anthem “Strange Fruit” at a time when an anti-lynching bill couldn’t even get through Congress. She accomplished all this while struggling with heroin addiction and pervasive racism that made her highest profile gig, touring with clarinetist Artie Shaw’s white jazz orchestra at the peak of his popularity in 1938, an endless fight against blatant discrimination (as much in the North as in the South).


In the coming week, some of the finest jazz singers in the Bay Area are turning their attention to Holiday’s music. On Sunday afternoon, the Stanford Jazz Festival presents A Billie Holiday Celebration featuring Clairdee and Lady Bianca, a pairing of two very different singers that highlights the expansive nature of Holiday’s influence. And on July 17, Kim Nalley, who describes Lady Day as “one of the most important musicians in the 20th century, period,” presents “The Music of Billie Holiday” at SFJazz’s Miner Auditorium.


Lady Bianca spent the first half of her career as a top-shelf backup singer working the proverbial 20 feet from stardom, touring and recording with Frank Zappa, Van Morrison and blues greats such as John Lee Hooker and Willie Dixon. Better known in recent years as a blues powerhouse than a jazz vocalist, she earned praise in the early 1970s playing the role of Billie Holiday in jazz vocal legend Jon Hendricks’ popular show “Evolution of the Blues.” Immersing herself in Lady Day’s music, Lady Bianca absorbed her “laid back” phrasing.


“She took her time with the lyrics and expanded it until you know what she’s saying and you really got the point,” Lady Bianca says. “Some singers just sing the lyrics. You don’t get the feeling of the song. She took your complete attention, and I noticed that it worked for me to take a little more time when I sing.”


Like many people growing up in the 1970s, Clairdee first became aware of Holiday via the mostly apocryphal 1972 biopic “Lady Sings the Blues,” which starred Diana Ross. When she went to check out Holiday’s recordings, Clairdee first heard the icon’s work from the 1950s when her voice could sound frayed.


“I wasn’t impressed at all, and I just didn’t listen to her for many years,” Clairdee says. “It wasn’t until an extended tour in Japan in 1999 that I heard her earlier work from the 1930s and I was completely blown away. Then I started doing a lot of focused listening, studying her phrasing and the emotion that she put into a single word, or turn of phrase.”


Kim Nalley had almost the reverse experience with Holiday’s music. Growing up in a household suffused with jazz, she found the beauty in Holiday’s late, vulnerable recordings, particularly the 1958 album “Lady in Satin.” She got turned on to Holiday’s swing era recordings a little later, then delved deeply into her discography when she was cast in C.J. Verburg’s musical “Lady Day in Love.”


At the time, she was ambivalent about Holiday, whose addiction and often-abusive relationships with men seemed to make her an ill-fitting role model for contemporary artists. But as Nalley completes her Ph.D in history at UC Berkeley, she’s found a different perspective on Holiday, recognizing the strength, fortitude and self-possessed musical vision behind her incalculable creative achievements.


“I became much more proud of her,” Nalley says. “It took me a second to realize what a big deal it was to do ‘Strange Fruit.’ This song was written by a communist and published in communist newspapers. The guy who wrote it, a Jewish man Abel Meeropol, published it under a pseudonym. Billie is attaching her name to a song when even the writer won’t do that.”  -30-


Bob Ringwald Solo, Duo, Trio, Quartet
Fulton Street Jazz Band
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www.ringwald.com
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I got caught taking a pee in the swimming pool today. The lifeguard shouted at me so loud, I nearly fell in.