The History of Jazz (37 page)

Lester Young’s relationship to modern jazz stands out as almost the mirror image of Hawkins’s. Young had little interest in being perceived as a modernist—his personal listening tastes tended toward popular songs and sentimental ballads—yet his style of playing not only foreshadowed the coming of bebop but to a certain extent inspired it. Of course, the lineage of Kansas City saxophone provides a direct connection between Young and bop progenitor Charlie Parker. But even more than geography, a shared sensibility links the two figures. Both used the higher intervals of the chords—the so-called color tones—as building blocks in their improvisations. But the harmonic content of their music was often implicit—rather than explicit as with Hawkins—for both employed a linear conception in which the augmented fifths, sixths, ninths, elevenths, and such were carefully integrated into taut improvised lines. Chords were never spelled out, merely implied, and even these harmonic hints could be so subtle as to pass notice. But the most significant change signaled by Young, and developed by Parker, came in the rhythmic construction of their phrases. The pronounced syncopations, which had dominated jazz since its New Orleans origins, were used more sparingly in their playing. The dotted eighth note lines, frequently adopted by Young’s predecessors, were now replaced by a smoother delivery of notes. Emphasis was less likely to fall on the first beat of the bar. The improvised lines carried a more definite 4/4 feel. One now heard a far greater use of triplets to add vitality to the phrases, perhaps as a substitute for the mostly absent syncopations. All these conceptual elements, propagated by Young, would be taken up and pushed further by Parker. No, Young’s music was not modern jazz. He remained, first and foremost, a product of the Swing Era. And even among Young’s contemporaries, there were many—Hawkins, Tatum, and Ellington are the most prominent examples—with far more progressive views about jazz as a modern art form. But Young, more than any of these others, set a foundation on which the next generation of modernists could build.

There is a second tradition in jazz that Young revitalized. Cool jazz would not emerge as a major force until the early 1950s. But even in the prewar years, Young was pointing the way to this alternative style. More than any instrumentalist of his generation, Young served as the crucial link between the 1920s cool pioneers (Beiderbecke, Trumbauer) and their Cold War successors (Getz, Mulligan, Davis, Desmond, Baker, Giuffre). In the 1930s, this was a lonely path to travel. Jazz has always been a hot art form—perhaps this is part of its essence—in its celebration of intensity, immediacy, and unbridled energy. The cool aesthetic, championing as it does a different set of virtues, has always been a minority point of view. The wholesale rejection of Young’s style at the hands of his peers during his tenure in the Henderson band capsulizes in a telling anecdote this very fact. By the time of Young’s mature work, his more relaxed approach was especially out of favor. It was, after all, the
Swing
Era, a time when most jazz bandleaders simply assumed that hotter was invariably better. That Young could rise above these obstacles and gain the admiration (eventually the emulation) of his peers with his cooler musical attitudes testifies to the lasting value of his innovations—and to the determination of this supposedly unassuming protagonist in the history of jazz.

Young’s achievements with the Basie band no doubt contributed to this expanding influence, but it is in his small-combo sides that his alternative conception of jazz is most telling. His recordings with the Kansas City Six and Kansas City Seven from the late 1930s are major works. His clarinet playing from this period captures a laconic elegance, galaxies apart from the pyrotechnics of the Benny Goodman/Artie Shaw schools then in fashion, while his tenor efforts produced classic saxophone statements on “Lester Leaps In” and “Dickie’s Dream.” Young is even more in the spotlight on his stellar trio recordings with pianist Nat King Cole from the early and mid-1940s. But perhaps the most unusual combo performance from this period finds Young and several Basie colleagues joining Goodman for a 1940 session that also featured Charlie Christian. This music, which was not released for many years, adds another valuable perspective on Young’s saxophone work, which stands out, even in this elevated company, with its melodic inventiveness and effortless delivery.

Young would continue to record in small-combo settings during the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, but few of those performances match these early excursions. Many have suggested that Young’s disastrous experiences in the U.S. Army during the closing months of World War II precipitated a downward spiral in his playing. Although Young never came close to a battlefield during his fifteen-month tour of duty, almost every other misfortune befell him: he was injured while running an obstacle course, hospitalized, operated on, psychoanalyzed, disciplined, arrested for possession of marijuana and barbiturates, incarcerated, and finally given a dishonorable discharge. The result was that Young, already introverted, became even more withdrawn, even more caught up in the odd mannerisms and jargon of his inner world.

His music also changed during the 1940s. His tone thickened and at times grew coarse; the melodic lines became less sprightly; the phrases sometimes sounded disjointed. But the chronology of this transformation is not as simple as has often been suggested. Some of these stylistic changes were already hinted at before Young’s military service, while even after his discharge the saxophonist was capable of performances of merit. Yet, as Young approached his late forties, these exalted moments grew increasingly rare. At times his playing sounded simply tired. Yet these were good years for Young’s finances, largely due to impresario and producer Norman Granz, who utilized the saxophonist’s talents in a wide range of commercial projects. In the decade leading up to his death in 1959, Young recorded and performed frequently and saw his stature in the jazz world rise in tandem with the growing respect for cool jazz. Beat generation writers would laud him, and hipsters emulated his unusual style of speaking. One 1950s disciple, saxophonist Brew Moore, would go so far as to assert that “anyone who doesn’t play like Lester is wrong.”

Of all of Young’s legacies from his best years, his recordings with singer Billie Holiday hold a special position in the jazz pantheon. Jazz fans admire them for their delicate intimacy, but even audiences blissfully ignorant of most aspects of the Swing Era have come to know and treasure these sides. And rightly so. The marriage of jazz and popular music—which occasionally leads to nuptial bliss, but too often takes on overtones of a shotgun wedding—has never been consummated with greater success than on these combo recordings. Even when weighted down by the most banal pop material, Holiday could transmute the dross of Tin Pan Alley into art song. She left a stamp so personal on many pieces that no later vocalist could attempt “All of Me” or “Foolin’ Myself” or “Mean to Me”—and a host of other songs—without inviting comparisons, inevitably unfavorable ones, with her definitive versions. Young’s contributions on these sides are small when measured in notes: cooing phrases answering Holiday’s vocal line (“Without Your Love”), an eight-bar solo to set off the bridge of a song (“My First Impression of You”), a simple melody statement (“Foolin’ Myself”), a snippet of clarinet playing (“I’ve Got a Date with a Dream”), or just a tantalizing four-bar introduction (“When a Woman Loves a Man”). But in terms of emotional power, these interludes are as persuasive as they come. Was there ever a jazz saxophonist better suited for demonstrating such artistry in four-and eight-bar increments? Given the titanic solos of the modern day, one can safely assume that jazz fans will never again encounter such elegant concision. Above all, there was a magical chemistry between these two elements, Holiday’s voice and Lester’s sax, leading some to characterize the collaboration between these platonic friends as a musical romance.

Holiday’s accomplishments are all the more remarkable when one realizes the limitations within which she worked. Her range, at best, spanned a scant one and a half octaves. Her voice, moreover, did not project strongly—unlike, say, a Bessie Smith, who also had a modest range but could compensate by belting out a song to the back rows. Holiday lacked the scat-singing chops of an Ella Fitzgerald, the tonal purity of a Sarah Vaughan, the exuberance of a Louis Armstrong—but what she had more than made up for these deficiencies. Her mastery was rooted in an incomparable sense of timing, phrasing that was supple yet uncommonly relaxed, and, above all, an ability to infuse a lyric with hitherto unknown depths of meaning. One might say that Billie Holiday was a stylist, not a virtuoso—unless emotional depth is a type of virtuosity. Her interpretations cut to the quick of a song, crafting a music of interiors, not surfaces.

But the limitations that Holiday encountered went far beyond issues of vocal technique and are entangled in the terrible circumstances of her life and times. Holiday’s story has been romanticized and dissected by turns. The romanticized version started with Holiday herself, who “wrote” an autobiography (
Lady Sings the Blues
) that mixed large doses of fiction with a smattering of facts. It came as no surprise that Hollywood made this book into a hit movie, further diluting the truth in the process. In later years, an ardent group of researchers—John Chilton, Linda Kuehl, Robert O’Meally, Donald Clarke, Stuart Nicholson, and others—would undertake their own analysis and reconstruction of Holiday’s life, while the memoirs of those who knew her (such as John Hammond and Leonard Feather) have provided additional perspectives. Given this outpouring of research and commentary, there is certainly no lack of biographical material at hand. But most commentators have expected too much from Holiday’s troubled life: they have wanted to twist it to reveal a moral, or annotate it with a running apology, or infuse it with the grandeur of Shakespearian tragedy. At the end of it all, there remains an enigmatic quality, an aura of mystery that surrounds Holiday’s life and refuses to be dismissed. She has become much like the other overanalyzed pop figures of the last century—Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Michael Jackson—for whom the stacks of biographies, the abundance of “explanations,” the ardor of the fans, seem to bring us no closer to their essence. It is the essence we want to understand, and all we are given are an assortment of facts, anecdotes, and hearsay.

In Holiday’s case, even the simplest facts—a name, a date, a relationship—can prove stubbornly complex. She typically gave her birth name as Eleanora, but the hospital records show “Eleanor” and the birth certificate states “Elinore.” She could borrow one of her mother Sarah’s last names, Harris or Fagan, and took on Gough when her mother married Phil Gough, and then changed back to Fagan again after their divorce. At other times her last name was Holiday or Holliday or Halliday. In later years, she adopted the last name of husbands or boyfriends: Monroe, McKay, Guy, Levy. And formal names coexisted from the start with nicknames. At the House of the Good Shepherd in Baltimore, where she was institutionalized briefly during her youth, she was known as Madge or Theresa. Lester Young gave her the lasting nickname of Lady Day (and she responded by christening him Pres). Her father—Clarence Holiday, best known as a guitarist with the Fletcher Henderson band—simply called her Bill. Her ultimate choice of Billie Holiday was deeply suggestive, affirming her ties with her absent father and his world of jazz music and traveling bands.

Few of us get to choose our names, but Holiday went further. She recrafted her life story in articles, interviews, and ultimately her autobiography. As later researchers have come to learn, these excursions into fantasy could take any number of directions: at times Billie would make her life sound more sordid than it actually was; at other moments she would give it an unwarranted varnish of respectability. She tells of being born in Baltimore on April 7, 1915—although jazz writer Stuart Nicholson later showed that the location was Philadelphia—some three years before her parents married. In fact, the relationship between Clarence Holiday and Billie’s mother, Sadie Fagan, both in their teens at the time, was a brief affair. No marriage record exists, and the singer’s birth certificate lists Frank DeViese as her father. Clarence, for his part, took little heed of his parental responsibilities. He was reluctant to make any public acknowledgment that Billie was his daughter until her career blossomed. In later life, Billie would be attracted to men much like her father: glamorous, fast and loose, irresponsible, tough, worldly—traits that would also characterize the various “no-good” lovers who would populate her songs.

During these years, Billie was often left in the care of relatives, where she was, by turns, abused, neglected, and possibly raped. In January 1925, a juvenile court declared her to be “a minor without proper care and guardianship” and placed her in the House of the Good Shepherd for a year. When she was released, she moved back with her mother, who by now had taken up with Wee Wee Hill, a philandering porter, some eight years her junior. Sadie and Hill soon moved to New York. Sometime in the late 1920s, Holiday followed them to this setting of her first musical triumphs.

Little is known about Holiday’s coming of age as a jazz singer. Recordings by Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith apparently made an impression on her. But the differences between her and these predecessors are as striking as the similarities. Armstrong’s carefree jocularity could play no role in Holiday’s more doleful worldview and, while she borrowed some material from Smith’s repertoire, Holiday was never primarily a blues singer, notwithstanding the title of her autobiography. But Holiday could take command of a lyric like no one else. Her 1936 recording for Brunswick, “I Cried for You”—the first standard she recorded and her biggest hit from the period—finds her wringing the tears from a song that so many other vocalists have delivered in a glib, matter-of-fact manner. Holiday interprets it as a melancholy torch song, even though the band is bouncing along at medium tempo; years later, she would grip audiences by presenting this same song as a ballad.