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there are some articles of clothing — wool jackets, blue jeans, certain types of shirts made from heavy cotton — that actually begin to look better as they age and the frays start to show. They never have the crispness that turned your head when you saw them on the rack. But aging gives them an easy familiarity, an inviting warmth. The frays are starting to show in Tony Bennett's voice, and the wear is very becoming on him. Listening to "On Holiday," Bennett's tribute to Billie Holiday and the latest of the theme albums he's recorded in the past few years, you're aware that there are notes he can no longer hit. There's a roughness — at times, almost a hoarseness — that wasn't present in his voice even five years ago. On Duke Ellington's "Solitude," he can't quite reach the note he's going for at the end, and parts of "If I Could Be With You" approach talk-singing. But throughout "On Holiday," Bennett does things I've never before heard him try (and one thing I wish I'd never heard him do: a "duet" with Holiday on "God Bless the Child," a creepy, necrophilous effect). In "Solitude," he draws out the notes in a gorgeous hush; it sweeps over you with the richness of velvet smoke. He lets the notes die away in a vibrato in his version of "Laughing at Life." Bennett must be aware of the new limitations of his voice. He rarely goes for the big flourish that has always been his trademark at the end of songs, and that's a good thing. He had a tendency to over-rely on that, even when it was inappropriate to the song. (He gives just a taste of that grand flourish in the way he punches the word "love" on the line "But I love him so" in "When a Woman Loves a Man.") There's a charming casualness to these interpretations, which are always aided by the delicate restraint of Ralph Sharon's piano, and the way the occasional string arrangements by Jorge Calandrelli are held beautifully in check. And there are wonderful touches, like the tossed-off laugh on the line "I'm a coward at best" on "She's Funny That Way." That laugh is the key to Tony Bennett. It's self-deprecating, and there isn't a trace of bitterness or reproach in it. Bennett is an odd choice to cover Billie Holiday, because his is essentially a sunny disposition. The feeling he gives off in live performance, that of a man doing exactly what he wants to do and radiating the pleasure he takes in it, carries over to his interpretations. There's a rich, wounded longing in his classic "When Joanna Loved Me," and in his version (perhaps the best of any version) of Hoagy Carmichael's and Johnny Mercer's "Skylark." But it's nearly impossible to imagine him doing something as dark
and devastating as the haunted quality Frank Sinatra brings to "Cottage
for Sale," let alone the masochistic groove that Billie Holiday
specialized in. Even though Bennett has stuck to more upbeat Holiday
numbers (mostly from her `30s work), you can hear the difference by
playing her "Me, Myself, and I" back-to-back with Bennett's. Billie's
is upbeat, but that slugged quality that overtook her is already
lurking in her voice. Bennett isn't trying to "do" Holiday (the way
Diana Ross did in "Lady Sings the Blues"). He knows his sensibility.
The deep and relaxed delight he takes in these interpretations could
only come from a man who's lived with the music he's covering for many
years. If you had to explain to someone who'd never heard of Billie
Holiday why people found such joy in the voice of a woman who
treasured and milked every bit of heartache she had in her, the
pleasure in Bennett's voice wouldn't be a bad place to start.
— Charles Taylor Charles Taylor is a regular contributor to Salon. made in April 1939, when she was still under contract to Columbia Records, Billie Holiday's first Commodore recording was a sociopolitical, as well as musical, event. The song was "Strange Fruit," and it was bluntly descriptive of Southern lynchings: The strange fruit was the hanging bodies of young men with their "bulging eyes and twisted mouth." Holiday presented the song to her producers at Columbia, and they refused to record it. So she approached the admirable owner of the Commodore Record Shop, Milt Gabler, and he worked out a deal with Columbia that allowed him to record "Strange Fruit" on his Commodore Records. Soon afterwards, the war started, a recording ban went into effect and Columbia Records dropped Holiday. Gabler pursued her. As a result, "The Complete Commodore Recordings" includes the initial "Strange Fruit" session, but also three sessions from 1944 at which she gave classic performances of "I Cover the Waterfront," "I'll Be Seeing You," "Billie's Blues" and others. All are here with the existing alternate takes. The collection begins with the daring, bleakly rendered "Strange Fruit." The song was politically controversial, but not devastatingly so. Holiday featured it every night during her sets at the Cafe Society and in the '50s sang it on television. Musically, at least to many, the song signaled a change in Holiday's style. Henceforth, the argument goes, her tempos were slower, and her style became more mannered even as her voice deteriorated. John Hammond, who discovered her and produced her early Columbia recordings, blamed the acclaim she received for "Strange Fruit." Others find nothing to decry, preferring the later, more dramatic Holiday. Annotator Stuart Nicholson doesn't want to commit himself. Commenting on "I Cover the Waterfront," he says, "Many observers have called the 1943-44 period the best of her career. Performances such as this, which are all we now have to go by, suggest that this absolute claim may not be very wide of the mark." Fans of the earlier Holiday — the small band Columbia sides of the '30s — note in those recordings the charm and intelligence of her singing, the lilt in her voice, her exquisite rhythm and the way she interacts with unparalleled accompanists such as Lester Young and Teddy Wilson. On the Commodore sides we hear a more sober singer with considerably less brilliant bands behind her. Holiday becomes the show. Her tempos are generally slower. On the "He's Funny That Way" recorded for Columbia in 1937, she had bounced along behind the soloing of Lester Young, sounding spirited but also wistful with her downward, vibrato-laden phrase endings. The Commodore "He's Funny That Way" (1944) finds Holiday singing much more slowly, and with a trio. She sounds exposed, vulnerable, not quite as buoyant. The two discs of this collection show that the slower tempo, at least in this case, wasn't
inevitable. There are five takes of "He's Funny That Way," and two of them are sprightly, as are
several other Commodore records, the cheerful "On the Sunny Side of the Street" and the wise-cracking "Billie's Blues." When she does become dramatic, she is stunning in a new way. Has
anyone sung jazz better than Holiday sings "I Cover the Waterfront," or on the three takes of
"Embraceable You"? Although it is certainly true that these Commodore sides don't have the
perfect balance between singer and accompanist, or the illuminating solos, of the Columbia
recordings, these sessions throw the emphasis on Holiday as an expressive singer at a time when
her voice and her manner could still handle the attention.
— Michael Ullman Michael Ullman is a professor of music and English at Tufts University. He is the author of "Jazz Lives." |
