An Evening with Billie Holiday
An Evening with Billie Holiday
What is it about jazz you love so much? That was the question a friend recently asked.
The easy answers came quickly—the freedom, the spontaneity, the coming together and the standing alone and coming back together, the tug on what sits at the seat of passion. I prefer straight-ahead jazz and I have a substantial collection of jazz recordings but it’s live jazz that takes me so far out of myself I am reinvented, rebirthed—I feel the tickling of hope in the spirit of the cynic. I wonder if beauty and goodness might exist in some daily-ness I’ve long forgotten.
One New Year’s Eve, I sat listening to Billie Holiday and then I couldn’t stop--I listened first to recorded live sessions and then to studio recordings. I was on the phone with a musician friend who was driving from Pennsylvania to Georgia that night to be with his brother who lay dying in the hospital. When he drove through a “dead zone” I turned the music up and when he was able to talk, he called again. It went on that way until 3 in the morning—music and mourning. Perhaps it is the shadow of that evening that makes me feel as I do about Lady Day’s music but that, I believe, sums up her life: Music and Mourning.
I have never been able to watch the end of the film “Lady Sings the Blues.” There has been great sadness in my life, tragedy in my family, and I am too hardened to be much of a weeper. Life as the Ultimate Fighter champion. No reason. No rules. Arbitrary. Not as though it knows your name only; it just favors it. It’s a slugging, kicking, boot-in-your groin, breast-crushing desire to kill for no reason beyond the will and power to do it. Jazz redeems me from that: tends my wounds, stays with me until I can take care of myself, never fails to come when I call. I owe it a great debt. That may be when I first began to feel such respect for jazz and the musicians who compose and play it. I give them my time, my attention, and my friendship out of respect and gratitude. We may all have a sad story to tell but not every story need have a sad ending.
I have learned from the music, especially Billie Holiday’s music.
For one thing, I learned from life and music that pain can make you beautiful or ugly. Billie Holiday experienced both and, to the limits of my own experiences, I understand both.
I’ve never been an inmate but I spent years working behind four sets of barred gate, learned to love people at their worst and hope for the best; know something about the racial prejudice that still seeps up like ground water out of our national soil. The white sheets that cloaked the identity of lynching parties have been replaced by laws which on the surface appear corrective but in some ways mask the ongoing racism. I am familiar with the despair that makes Pleasure and Power a mantra for those who are disenfranchised. Whether I trust or respect that is not the issue, but my eyes were opened to a world that runs parallel with the one in which the smaller number, called the majority, live. The history of jazz teaches you about that, as well.
Billie also taught me that music does not have to be perfect to be stunning and exquisite. That night I listened to Billie tease, moan, cry, make love, weep, slur, stagger and strut. She was magnificent! Oh, I wept that night—for joy, for sorrow, for despair, for hope. For lost faith and uncertainty that begs to believe, for love and hate, for skepticism and possibility, for Billie and for me. I would not trade her odd, faltering phrasing, the fog that descends as you listen, and her cry that warns you away from a collision one time and lays you bleeding on the rocks the next—all part of what makes some critical and others worship her sound. Darn that dream and bless it too, Billie sings. I don’t know what her dreams were and we know that much of her life was a waking nightmare. Who really cares whether it’s true whether Strange Fruit was written for her or not. When you hear her sing it, it belongs to her and to the memory of those who lived and still live with the horror of it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4ZyuULy9zs&feature=artist&playnext=1&list=AL94UKMTqg-9A_lZmS0-AFUMF6QSkGHcKL
The lyrics of the songs Billie Holiday sings resonate with anyone who has slugged it out with a Gloomy Sunday (the most deeply troubled lyrics of her repertoire) but Ain’t Nobody’s Business is the song I hum softly more often than not and belt out in my living room when I’m too angry to open the door and unleash that emotion on my critics. The intro is that odd mix of spit in your eye gumption that masks deep hurt:
There ain’t nothin I can do
or nothin I can say
that folks don’t criticize me
but I’m going to do
just as I want to anyway
and don’t care just what people say
Listen for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVwxCRy2jfI
Once that night of endless listening was over, I better understood Frank O’Hara’s, “The Day Lady Died.” He relates a day of going about his ordinary business and then picking up “a New York Post with her face on it”:
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the FIVE SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
It's music that makes you die a little death--or, it's that for me. Yet, it never leaves me in the tomb.
There is resurrection in it, confusion and marvel. Some may find it odd, even objectionable, that jazz infiltrates my religious experience and enriches it. St. Francis said, Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible. I hear that in the music.
Listening to this music, getting lost in it, finding myself again, realizing in some transcendent moments it achieves the impossible, makes it possible for me to do what I love much better and wheat I do not love in spite of that. If Billie were part of this conversation, she might break in here and sing The Blues Are Brewin'.
As Hayden Carruth’s poem “Three Paragraphs” closes:
in the history
of creative mind and heart/ not singular, not the
rarity
we think, but real and a glory
our human shining, shekinah… Ah,
holy spirit, ninefold
I druther’ve bin a-setting there, supernumerary
Cockroach i’ th’ corner, a-listenin, a listenin…
than be the Prasedint ov the Wuurld.
I guess I love jazz so much because “it ain’t nobody’s business if I do.” That’s enough of an answer. For now.