by John Szwed
What’s most striking about Holiday’s improvisations is that when she makes changes in the rhythm or the melody it is always in service to the words, not the other way around. And yet she still manages to reach the highest standards of the rhythmic feeling that jazz musicians call swinging.
The Music of Speech and Verse
When Gunther Schuller noted that many of the characteristics of Holiday’s style are mysteriously impossible to describe in standard musical notation, he suggested that a poet might better be able to express what she was achieving. Holiday’s singing might indeed be best described in terms of poetic devices, and possibly even grasped by those more attuned to poetics than those trained strictly in music.
The difference between speech and song is probably much exaggerated, especially since little serious attention has been paid to the matter by musicologists and linguists. A different approach would ask what the two forms have in common. If we look at verse as a form of speech, it’s clear that there is musicality in verse itself. For that matter, there is a kind of musicality in all speech. Rhythm, so obvious in poetry, is not so often acknowledged in speech, but the rhythms of speech are far more regular and fixed than we normally think, perhaps because they are so basic that they remain out of awareness. Most of the English spoken in the United States and Britain is a stress-timed language. Syllables may be longer or shorter and last different amounts of time, but the time between consecutively stressed vowels is relatively constant regardless of how slowly or quickly one speaks. Put another way, there is a regular beat to English. How this works out in song, where notes may be held for a time longer or shorter than the rules for speech allow, is not always clear, but it does show that there is room for composers and singers to change the feel of language in song. The possibilities expand even further when songs are written or sung by speakers of different dialects of English—such as that spoken in South Africa, the West Indies, and to some degree in regional and older forms of African American English—in which there is a different pattern of timing, syllable timing, where stresses fall on syllables, many of which are of different lengths, unlike the brief length of all vowels.
The musical nature of verse offers the singer the option of following the curve of the written melody and letting it direct the flow of sound, or of using a flatter, more speechlike voice to call attention to the words’ own musicality. In the bridge or middle section of “Foolin’ Myself,” for example, Holiday sings:
And ev’ry time I pass
And see my face in a looking glass
I tip my hat and say
There is the rhythmic repetition of going from t to t in “tip my hat,” or in the movement from “pass” to “see” to “face” to “glass” to “say” that sets up a pattern of s’s and s-sounding consonants. While music of verse may already be present in the lyrics of the song, it is not given as much attention by other singers as it is by Holiday, who imparts it with her characteristically lucid diction and idiosyncratic stress.
Holiday virtually recomposed popular songs to such an extent that she invited critics to compare her to some of the most esteemed names in English literary history, poets like John Donne or Gerard Manley Hopkins. Such leaps into comparative prosody may have left bemused fans shaking their heads, but there was more than mere hyperbole (or hype) involved. John Donne, a British poet born less than ten years after Shakespeare, brought a highly personal poetry into existence, using irregular rhythms that were closer to speech than those used in typical Elizabethan versification. Hopkins, a nineteenth-century British poet, experimented with what he called sprung rhythm, a more natural form of verse that he believed was closer to patterns of speech, spoken poetry, folk ballads, and nursery rhymes. When Holiday altered rhythm patterns to free up the sheet music of pop songs, she was following the same impulse driving those earlier poets, and certainly later writers who initiated free verse. None of this is that far from the practice of jazz musicians who alter written song rhythms, turning them toward the jazz vernacular. When Holiday was working at Café Society in the late 1930s, there was a craze for “jazzing the classics,” retrofitting the old masters’ works with hip rhythmic clothing. It was all part of jazz tradition that is sometimes called “signifyin(g)”—a concept and a word borrowed from literary and spoken language to indicate improvisatory play on and around a subject.
CHAPTER SIX
The Singer II
A lot of singers try to sing like Billie, but just the act of playing behind the beat doesn’t make it soulful.
Miles Davis
She could just tear you up with the way she could say a lyric.
Bobby Henderson
Much of Holiday’s own sense of drama and emotion was relocated from the lyrics to her use of rhythm and time, and her very modern sense of swing. She could enter a phrase two or three beats late, then seemingly catch up at the end of a phrase, and drop back again into the band’s rhythm at the start of the next phrase. (Compare Holiday’s “lagging” vocal against a fixed beat in “St. Louis Blues” with Bessie Smith’s relatively straightforward rhythm on the same song.) She sometimes seems to be lingering so far behind the beat that it appears that she will still be singing after the musicians have reached the end of the song. Yet it never happens. By extending vowels, clipping notes, stressing syllables, and taking rests along the way, she stays out of the band’s rhythm at the same time that she emphasizes the words’ meaning. In the bridge, or middle section, of “Foolin’ Myself” (1937), every syllable is well off the beat established by the rhythm section, especially in the second line:
And ev’ry time I pass
And see my face in a looking glass
I tip my hat and say
When she reaches the next two lines in the song, she gives stress to most of the syllables, which enables her to return to the band’s rhythm and at the same time emphasize the self-disdain in the song:
On “Billie’s Blues” (aka “I Love My Man”), a song she composed, she stresses almost every syllable.
All this might seem to be a prosaic matter, just a function of the way we naturally talk. But in English the normal pattern of writing and speaking consists of stressed syllables alternating with unstressed, so putting words together in a song in a manner in which any syllable or vowel can be stressed, and still making it sound natural, is not all that easy. Add to that the varying rhythmic pulse set up by accompanying drums, bass, and piano, and the possibilities and complexities multiply rapidly. Jazz is an interactive music, one of the most complex of all human musical interactions. When saxophonist Ornette Coleman said that the difference between rock and jazz was that in rock everyone is playing with the drummer whereas in jazz the drummer is playing with everyone else, he struck at the heart of what is special about interaction in jazz. There is a pulse, a rhythm, a subdivision of time at work in well-played jazz, but one that can be manipulated and adjusted by each player such that the rhythmic expectations of both musicians and audience are surprised. Jazz is the sound of surprise.
Though her approach to rhythm seemed new and daring at the time, and may still seem so, much of it was common among instrumentalists in swing music. Regardless of what some textbooks may say about the consistency of swing rhythm, the great players frequently shifted from syncopated to straight time during the same solo. Playing or singing behind or ahead of the beat is one of the most common distinguishing features of jazz, though, granted, no one uses it with the frequency and skill of Holiday.
Her use of delay or retard may have been one of the rare occasions on which a singer was an inspiration for jazz instrumentalists, especially those players of the style known as cool. (Listen, for example, to the first statement of the melody on Lennie Tristano’s version of “Foolin’ Myself,” titled “Love Lines” on the Atlantic album The New Tristano.)
What is truly singular about Holiday among vocalists is that in spite of her typically delayed approach
to syllables, words, and phrases, she does not always sing behind the beat (or, for that matter, ahead of it), though it certainly may sound as if she is doing so. Whitney Balliett, in a New Yorker profile of Teddy Wilson, gave a hint at how this musical phenomenon works when he wrote, “Part of the appeal of the Wilson-Holiday Brunswick [recordings] is the contrast—not to say struggle—between his rhythmic rectitude and her alarming and irresistible rhythmic liberties. She sometimes sang entire vocals outside the beat while Wilson, in his accompanying solo, effortlessly gave her a reading of her exact location.”
Johnny Guarnieri, the pianist with Artie Shaw’s band when Billie was one of its singers, gives us a sense of what it was like to try to accompany Billie if one didn’t know her approach to rhythm:
The first night she handed me some tattered lead sheets, and said, “Give me four bars.” I played four bars. But she didn’t come in. Figuring she hadn’t heard me, or just missed her cue, I started over again. Suddenly I felt a tap on the back of my head and I heard her say, “Don’t worry ’bout me—I’ll be there.” She added that she liked to come in behind the beat, as I discovered, and that I didn’t have to bother to make her look good. Looking back, I’d say that few performers had such a solid judgment about tempi as she did, particularly when it came to doing certain tunes in a very slow tempo . . . Billie was the greatest tempo singer that ever lived.
But how did she sing independently of the pianist’s or the band’s beat, give different rhythmic values to the original song’s notes along the way, and still manage to remain faithful to the lyrics? Close listening, and the work of some astute musicians and scholars, provide us with another insight into her style.
What Holiday achieves does not involve what classical musicians call “rubato,” a manipulation of rhythm in which the singer and the accompanist both briefly move out of the existing tempo and then return to it. As early as her first recordings with Teddy Wilson, the band stays in a fixed tempo while Holiday’s melody line does not strictly follow that tempo but remains unsynchronized with it. One way to think about this kind of differentiated rhythm—which Hao Huang and Rachel V. Huang call “dual-track time”—is to grasp that “there are two beat systems functioning simultaneously, one governing the accompaniment and the other regulating the vocal line.” These “two parallel strands organizing the passage of time might be irreconcilable, yet they have to be grasped simultaneously” because that “is the profound conceptual challenge of Billie’s art.” (See the placement of beats in Holiday’s singing, the band’s accompaniment, and Cole Porter’s words in the transcription of “What Is This Thing Called Love?”) Another way to view this technique is to look outside the European musical tradition for a source or precedent. (There are European prototypes of dual-track time in eighteenth-century Italian music and later in Chopin’s piano performances of his own compositions where the bass and treble lines each have their own beat system, but they are not typical of European classical music.) Holiday’s use of rhythm and time is closer to the cross rhythms of West African music, to Cuban and other Afro-Latin musics, to early blues singer-guitarists’ recordings like Charlie Patton’s “Pea Vine Blues” and to jazz pianists’ recordings such as Jelly Roll Morton’s “New Orleans Blues” and James P. Johnson’s “Keep Off the Grass.”
Singing is sometimes described as a heightened form of speech, a form of communication that carries messages that can’t be communicated in speech. But Holiday’s accompanists insisted that Holiday sang like she talked, a style that becomes even more apparent in her later recordings. The idea that instrumental jazz is a speech-inflected music has been noted for years by jazz scholars, and some see it as a defining feature of the music. During an interview she did with talk show host Tex McCrary for DuMont TV in November 1956, Billie was asked to recite the lyrics of some of her songs without instrumental accompaniment, and she chose “God Bless the Child,” “Don’t Explain,” and “Fine and Mellow.” Her singing and speaking voices were in the same tonal range, and many of the same pitch patterns and the glides that occur between words or syllables were also very similar in both forms of communication.
Her diction was exceptional, whatever she sang. She avoided contractions and melisma (singing a single syllable across several different notes) wherever she could, and made each word count. She was very aware of the importance of phrasing in her songs, the grouping of notes and words in ways that would make musical and verbal sense of them or give them emotional weight. Her performances “live phrase to phrase,” as her biographer John Chilton put it. Once, while she was singing in Chicago and Frank Sinatra was there with the Harry James band, she and Frank went out on the town, and she was later asked by columnist Earl Wilson what it was that she had taught Frank that later led him to say how much she had influenced his singing: “I told him that he didn’t phrase right. He should bend certain notes. He says, ‘Lady, you aren’t commercial.’ But I told him certain notes at the end he could bend, and later he said I inspired him. Bending those notes—that’s all I helped Frankie with.”
The poet Robert Creeley once wondered in admiration how jazz musicians were able to rephrase songs written by others so that they seemed different from the original without recomposing them in advance. He might better have wondered about jazz singers, who reshape those same phrases into something intensely personal without ever altering the actual words.
Holiday’s songs get much of their affective and emotional power from her ability to create the feel of simultaneously speaking and singing. She developed a kind of speech-song in which sliding pitches that convey emotions like surprise, happiness, or sorrow occur as they do in speech. This use of pitch doesn’t appear as often in music, where sustained pitches typically change to other sustained pitches by steps. Holiday’s approach allows us to hear the melody of speech while she never completely abandons the melody of the song. She also pauses between phrases, allowing her to realign the difference between the band’s rhythm and hers and to prepare for the beginning of the next phrase, which she often starts at a faster tempo. (“What Is This Thing Called Love?” from April 14, 1945, with the Bob Haggart Orchestra and “All of Me” from March 21, 1941, with the Billie Holiday Orchestra are good examples of these techniques in Holiday’s dual-track singing.)
A kind of speech-song can also be found in diseuse (literally, “talking” or “storytelling”), a turn-of-the-twentieth-century style that French cabaret singers such as Yvette Guilbert developed for their story songs (many French songs then were essentially cast in the form of stories), where the singer breaks in and out of speech, often with the rhythm section stopped. Others talked over the melody, only occasionally dropping back into song. Édith Piaf, for example, sometimes stops singing completely, speaks several lines of the song, turning the lyric into pure verse, and then returns to singing.
It might be tempting to look for the source of Holiday’s style in Parisian cabaret diseuse, since she sang several well-known French chansons, but as with so many other efforts to trace African American creativity to Europe alone, it would be inaccurate.
There are in fact many distinctive examples of speech-music relationships among African-derived peoples of the Americas. In the United States, sermons often begin in prose and then move into intonational verse and are combined with music. Religious songs likewise frequently include short spoken lessons or sermonettes that are accompanied by a choir. Some blues songs contain spoken passages, occasionally based on personal experiences or folktales (whereas in European folk traditions the song is usually within the story). Early black pop vocal groups used similar music-speech techniques. In this case a song usually is first sung solo by a tenor with precise diction, and is then followed by a middle chorus spoken in vernacular speech by a different singer. (Listen, for example, to the Ink Spots’ “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire.”) Some radio DJs delivered their entire programs in rhymed and highly pitched speech. Gospel singers and soul singers often
use spoken phrases or longer spoken passages in the midst of songs that blur the line between music and speech. (Singer Howard Tate is a good example.) The most recent African American use of this tradition is rap, in which the melody of speech is the song, often set to rhythms that are similar to children’s game rhymes or jump rope verse.
The soft but declarative quality that Holiday brought to many of her songs was also part of the rhythmic irregularity that is so often noted in discussions of her work. It enabled her to find something valuable in melodies of otherwise weak song lyrics by shifting accents around and eliminating melodic excess. From 1939 on she sometimes sang so slowly and with enough emotional detachment that the rhythmic intentions of the original songs became lost. On the other hand, in “Strange Fruit” the horrors she describes benefit from the sense of shocked immobility that this approach can provide. Critic Margo Jefferson suggests that this emotional distance allowed her to refashion “all of the ordinary elements [of song], somewhat realigned and reproportioned, but recognizable and perfectly shaped . . . like a cubist painting . . . a musical cubism.”
