Billie Holiday

by John Szwed

  This sequence of events certainly was not what Decca had in mind when they were changing their ideas about how Billie should be produced. It is astonishing, however, that she could continue to work at this pace in such chaotic personal circumstances, all the while adapting to a constantly shifting musical environment.

  Billie Holiday, Norman Granz, and Verve Records

  Billie first visited Los Angeles back in October 1941 to open Café Society, a new club run by the actor and comedian Jerry Colonna, who was attempting to copy (without authorization) the two New York clubs. Although the venue folded within a few weeks, while she was there she was introduced to dozens of Hollywood stars and executives. She also met Norman Granz, a student at UCLA and a film editor at MGM, who was hanging out at jazz clubs with his girlfriend, Marie Bryant, a dancer and singer who had worked with Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, and Duke Ellington and was rising fast in LA. When Billie returned a year later to work at Billy Berg’s Trouville Club, Granz chatted with her between sets; one night she broke into tears as she told him that some of her friends of color had been turned away when they came to see her perform. Granz and Marie had already experienced something similar as an interracial couple; her story moved him to go straight to Berg. Because Granz knew that Berg would tell him he would lose business if he integrated the club, Granz approached him with an offer to stage low-cost Sunday jam sessions with the best of Los Angeles’s musicians if he could be assured there would be no discrimination against anyone. Berg bought the idea, presumably because he was not doing any business in the afternoon as it was, and whatever happened, it wouldn’t affect his evening events. But when the Sunday sessions became overwhelmingly successful, he desegregated all of his club’s performances. Granz took that as a sign that more could be done, and he developed a series of public jam sessions at nonsegregated venues that succeeded better than he imagined.

  Yet this was a city where, over the next two years, racial strife intensified with the infamous Sleepy Lagoon gang murder case and the Zoot Suit Riots, events that lumped together Mexican Americans, African Americans, jazz musicians, and miscellaneous hipsters. Granz staged a jazz fund-raiser for the defense of those arrested at the Philharmonic Auditorium. “Jazz at the Philharmonic” was the title of the event, and it was too good a name to lose, so for years afterward he presented jazz events that filled concert halls across the country, producing recordings, putting musicians up in the best hotels, and paying them well. He was breaking social and musical rules left and right, and becoming something of a hero to those who knew and worked with him.

  But not everyone in jazz was happy with Granz as impresario. He liked to put musicians of different styles and generations together onstage and encouraged heated competition between them that thrilled audiences and had them cheering and stomping. It resulted in a circus atmosphere, some said. Others were not in favor of putting musicians in large halls where they often had to change what they played to fit the space.

  Singers were a different story with Granz. He had always been a fan of Ella Fitzgerald, and paid dearly to get her away from Decca so that he could manage her career and produce her records on his own label. Like Billie, Ella had recorded extensively for Milt Gabler, and Granz followed Gabler’s lead with album-oriented productions, concept albums, and richly arranged songs. Where he excelled was carefully thought-out live recordings and her many songbook albums, monuments to the greatest American composers of popular song.

  After a couple of JATP concerts with Holiday as a guest in the mid-1940s, he signed her as well, and from 1952 to 1957 produced a long series of albums that broke with Gabler’s softer approach. Granz attempted to return to the glories of her 1930s small-group sessions by surrounding her with some of the best musicians of the time—Oscar Peterson, Jimmy Rowles, Charlie Shavers, Harry “Sweets” Edison, Ben Webster, Paul Quinichette, Benny Carter—and most of the songs on her records with him were proven standards. They ranged over a wide variety of subjects in diverse moods, though the album covers, which typically featured darkly lit photos and David Stone Martin’s spidery, stark line drawings, implied a troubled story inside.

  Granz wanted her to try songs she hadn’t done before, and “Everything Happens to Me,” “Tenderly,” “Stormy Weather,” “East of the Sun,” and “Autumn in New York” were choices welcomed by fans who found it hard to believe that she hadn’t done them before. Only a few of the numbers she recorded, such as “P.S. I Love You,” seem ill-conceived. With Billie, Granz was also willing to take some chances in the studio. Sometimes there were arrangements, but more often she and he decided on songs at the last minute. At times they recorded on the fly. Pianist Oscar Peterson recalled that she could launch into a song without naming it or waiting for something to be planned:

  She’d walk over, say, “I used to do this,” and begin singing . . . but the way she sang it, we could hear the key and just begin playing behind her. It would automatically become a run-through and as soon as it was over, she’d go over to the mike and say, “All right, let’s try this one now.” I’d say, “Wait a minute, Billie—” but she was off and running. I didn’t always have time to work out a written introduction for her, but she didn’t care. She’d just say, “Play those little things you play, and I’ll come in.”

  When Jimmy Rowles was a pianist on a Granz recording, he was uncomfortable with Norman’s last-minute choices of songs, and on his own rehearsed with Billie beforehand to pick out some material:

  We never had time to get together on chords, Barney Kessel, the bassist, and me. Now that’s really difficult, especially when Norman would pull out a tune and say, “Here it is: ‘Prelude to a Kiss’ . . . go!” Everyone’s got their own conception of how to play the tune and so it comes out sounding like a jam session.

  Granz sometimes also let her take as long as she wanted to make a record, and to come and go from the sessions as she pleased, though it could be a very expensive process. The results, surprisingly, were consistently good, and the musicianship high. Consistency had worked well with Ella Fitzgerald, where one might never expect to be surprised. But surprise and discovery were the keys to Billie’s best 1930s work, and though the results of Granz’s approach were more conventional, there were often details to strike the listener. “Love for Sale,” a 1952 duo with Billie and Oscar Peterson, is as intimate a recording as she ever made, especially since Granz recorded her voice louder, hiding nothing. Peterson recalled, “[Norman] wanted to display the complete interplay between us, and he wanted her to express the song anyway she felt. . . . He told me ‘just go with her’—and so I did.” Bringing in musicians from the Basie band for one album, or returning to some of her 1930s triumphs (“I Wished on the Moon,” “What a Little Moonlight Can Do”), were also inspired choices, even when they were not as rewarding as he may have wished.

  The Last Sessions

  Holiday’s final two studio recordings, Lady in Satin (Columbia, 1958) and Last Recording (MGM, 1959), are the most controversial recordings she ever made, and have been argued over endlessly for the past sixty-five years. Her record companies seemed to want to forget them: Lady in Satin has not been reissued for seventeen years, and Last Recording for twenty-six years. When in 2001 Columbia brought out its big CD boxed set Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia, 1933–1944, it left out her 1958 album. All the stranger because both recordings were rather lavishly produced, especially the first, with its full string section, big band, three women singers backing her up, and some of the best jazz and classical musicians in the country. It was the most expensive production she had ever been given.

  It was Billie’s idea not to renew her contract with Verve and to move back to Columbia after many years. She was not getting much work and she needed the money just to get by. Ever since she had heard Nelson Riddle’s arrangements for Frank Sinatra in the early 1950s, she had wanted Riddle to arrange an album for her. But when she heard Ray Ellis’s treatment of “Fo
r All We Know” on his 1957 album Ellis in Wonderland, she decided she could work with him. Ray Ellis was a journeyman saxophonist who in the mid-1950s began arranging hit songs for the Drifters, Doris Day, Connie Francis, Johnny Mathis, and Bobby Darin, and had become a protégé of Mitch Miller at Columbia. According to her new lawyer, Earle Zaidins, she had been complaining that Joe Glaser never got the right bookings for her, and she was forced to do the same music over and over. Her best audiences had been white, she said, and she wanted regular bookings in the big “white rooms” like the Plaza, the Waldorf, and the Empire Room. When she and Zaidins went to Columbia, they signed her to record with Ellis.

  After years of revisiting older material with Norman Granz, Columbia saw her return to the label as a new beginning, and it was agreed that for the record she was to sing only songs that she had never recorded before. That meant learning them and fitting them to arrangements by a man she’d never worked with, yet she failed to show for any meetings or rehearsals to go over the songs with Ellis. The recording sessions were set to start at ten each night, but she never arrived before midnight. She had run through some of the material with her pianist Mal Waldron, but Ellis had put introductory verses into the arrangements for a number of the songs. Since she normally ignored the verses of songs and went right to the refrains, she didn’t know the words or the melodies for some of them. Even worse, she seemed unfamiliar with a few of the songs as well.

  She was not in good health and was drinking gin from a water pitcher throughout the sessions. When the playbacks were checked by the engineer, she didn’t want the musicians to hear them because she was embarrassed by her singing. The word in the studio was that she was setting herself up for failure, and comparisons to Marilyn Monroe were whispered about. Ellis finally lost his patience. The on-the-spot rehearsals, the false starts, retakes, and overdubs began to pile up on the tape reels, and when they discovered they were short one song, Ellis and Holiday had to take a cab at three in the morning to Colony Records on Broadway, where they leafed through sheet music until they found “You’ve Changed,” a song she had in fact recorded once before. They finished the sessions in only three days, but Ellis left in disgust and wanted no part of the remix sessions that followed.

  Somehow, though, she had made it work. She was aging prematurely, she was sick and had to be helped on and off the stage, and she was having trouble reading and remembering lyrics. There were missed notes, her voice was husky at times, and her vibrato had become much faster. The tempos were slower, and there were no improvising musicians for her to converse with musically as she sang, but the arrangements, though lush, were sometimes minimal, and set her voice floating loose on top of them. She counted on the strength of her recitative, the ability to sing out of tempo and not seem lost. Her phrasing was still sensitive to the words, remaking their points of emphasis and shifting meaning by surprising changes of stress as she sang. The essence that Gunther Schuller said lay behind the surface techniques of her singing seemed more obvious now than ever with the loss of some of her other abilities, but her vocal artistry was still there. The musicians were impressed. She was still a star to them.

  Billie thought Lady in Satin was the best album she ever made (even though she was unhappy about Ray Ellis’s insisting on having “those white bitches sing behind me”). She particularly liked “Violets for Your Furs” and told her friends that young singers should listen to it. She also liked “You’ve Changed,” even though she had been crying as she sang it. The strings were a comfort to her: Singing with small jazz groups had been giving her headaches, she said.

  When the album appeared in 1958, the lines were drawn hard and fast among her fans. Those used to hearing her in the sparest of jazz bands felt the string arrangements were saccharine and cluttered. She’d abandoned jazz; it was a flawed attempt at a pop record, commerce at its worst. Glen Coulter, the most sensitive writer on Holiday, blamed Ellis entirely: The “ideal accompaniment for a jazz vocal is a many-noted commentary which does not interfere with what the singer is doing, but rather provides a texture of the utmost contrast and is a springboard of rhythm. Ellis provides a sleek, slow, insufficiently subordinated counterpoint that throws Holiday’s time off and gives her nothing to brace itself against.” Odd that those who thought she was at her best when she overcame inferior songs would think she would not be able to rise above what they considered inferior accompaniment. Others objected to her voice. The album was morbid, and literally a disgrace. She was imitating herself, the curse of the aging artist.

  The liner notes were themselves startlingly defensive, as if the buyer was being warned, but too late. A goodly part of producer Irving Townsend’s notes for the original LP reminded the listener that Holiday had had a miserable life, though for the material she was performing on the record, that was a benefit, because it made it “so easy to believe what she sings.” Is it jazz? he asks. “Yes. It is jazz because Billie Holiday sings jazz, no matter what the accompaniment is . . .” In Ray Ellis’s remarks in the liner notes for the CD issue almost forty years later, he wrote that he had been unhappy with her performance when they recorded it, but that he now realized that he was listening musically, rather than emotionally. Michael Brooks’s comments for the same CD reissue were outright grim: “An autobiographical study . . . an open wound . . . vocal cords flayed by the acid of racism and commercial indifference . . . the strings did not bring out the best in Billie . . . she tried to divorce herself from her roots.”

  Still, there were those, including many musicians, who thought Lady in Satin was a triumph when it first appeared. Miles Davis, for example: “I’d rather hear her now. She’s become much more mature. Sometimes you can sing words every night for five years, and all of a sudden it dawns on you what the song means.”

  • • • • •

  If there were some who thought that recording Lady in Satin given her mental and physical state was a mistake, then another record by her a year later must have been seen as madness. Billie Holiday (the title was changed to Last Recording when she died four months after its issue) is one of the least acknowledged recordings by a major artist, and even her biographers have tried to ignore its existence.

  By 1959 Ray Ellis had moved to MGM as an executive, where he would work with Barbra Streisand and later produce his own easy listening albums. One of his first projects was the Holiday recording. In her discussions with Ellis, Billie made it clear that she wanted it to sound more like the albums Sinatra was making at the time—brighter, more confident, maybe using some of Sinatra’s songs, and this time, no backup singers. Again, all the songs would be ones she had never before recorded.

  The accompaniment on Last Recording was divided between three ensembles, all smaller than the ones used on Lady in Satin: two with strings, one without, along with three soloists—Jimmy Cleveland, trombone, Harry “Sweets” Edison, trumpet, and Gene Quill, alto saxophone. A few of the songs have arrangements close to the sound of the Sinatra/Nelson Riddle albums, with “Sweets” Edison providing muted trumpet fills as he did so often on Sinatra recordings, and “All the Way” and “I’ll Never Smile Again” were associated with Sinatra. Two songs were quite old: “There’ll Be Some Changes Made,” a hit for Ethel Waters the year it was first written, and “Baby, Won’t You Please Come Home,” identified with Bessie Smith. One, “It’s Not for Me to Say,” was almost brand new.

  Her health was much worse than when she’d recorded the year before, and she was so weak that she often had to be held up in a chair by her secretary, Alice Vrbsky. It was Alice, not Ellis, who now determined how long the sessions could last, and she ended them when Billie was weakening, so most of the songs on the record are first takes. Some of them are faded at the end, suggesting that there might have been problems with her held notes at the conclusions. The orchestra sometimes sounds shallow in the mix, and on several songs Billie’s voice is too high. It is most likely that she was not able to sing in the keys in which some
of the arrangements were written, and it was too late and too expensive to redo them. The results sound as if the orchestral track was recorded in the key as planned, then slowed down to a lower pitch and tempo. Billie was then recorded separately at the same lower pitch as the revised orchestra track, next overdubbed to the orchestra’s track, and then both orchestra and voice were brought together and sped back up to the desired key and tempo. (Ray Ellis at one point conceded that this had been done, but later changed his mind about his answer.) The results may sound a bit weird, but as many said of the album, it was better than it had a right to be. Whatever the troubles in the studio, it still sounded authentically like Billie Holiday, and no one else has been able to get that sound. How ironic, then, that necessity forced a mid-twentieth-century studio to use electronic tricks to complete the project, bringing Billie Holiday into twenty-first-century electronic pitch correction, shape-shifting compression, punched-in edits, and the authenticity of vampire sonic technology.

  • • • • •

  When she was on her deathbed at the Metropolitan Hospital in Harlem, her lawyer told her that he could arrange yet another recording with MGM, but Billie doubted that she would ever be able to sing again. He was persistent, explaining that the MGM executives were serious businesspeople, that they had already checked with the doctors to see if she would live and were assured that she would. If that was so, Billie suggested, they could bring the recording equipment to the hospital and they could call the record Lady at the Met!