Happy Birthday Lady Day

What a way to start the morning. Today is April 7th, the 94th birthday of one America’s greatest performing talents. There are a thousand other words and phrases to describe her, but that one seems appropriately encompassing for Billie Holiday. I didn’t even realize the significance of the day until one of my friends sent a link to a video of Lady Day performing “Fine and Mellow” on a CBS television special back in 1957. To this day, it’ll take the rug out from underneath you.

“The Sound of Jazz” was an historic television event. Never before had so many giants of the genre come together on the small screen, and never again would they. The evening’s two biggest stars, Holiday and saxophonist Lester Young, would be dead within two years. This makes the video of “Fine and Mellow” both sublime and bittersweet.

Holiday and Young were longtime friends who had collaborated for years, producing such legendary sides as “All Of Me”, “The Man I Love”, and “He’s Funny That Way”. It was Young who bestowed upon Holiday the nickname “Lady Day”, and Holiday in turn nicknamed Young “Prez”, as in President. Yet they had not spoken for quite some time prior to the December 8 taping of the show. Even during the rehearsal, they avoided one another. Once the music started, though, whatever physical and emotional distance separated them evaporated, and suddenly it was Lady Day and the Prez, together again, in synch one more time. Here’s how music critic Scott Waldman describes it:

Prez, who had wrecked his body with alcohol, was in such ill health he couldn't stand for the duration of the six-minute song. Holiday launched into the song and each sax man took a turn. Gerry Mulligan was first and played a solo in double-time. Webster was next, blowing a beautiful, breathy chorus. And then it was time for Prez. When it was Young's turn he wearily stood up, and locked eyes with Holiday as she sang a song with lines like "Love is like a faucet / It turns off and on". As Lady Day sang, Prez hit every note exactly in time with her and they took off like two eagles riding an air current as they rose higher and higher, way out of that studio and those television sets, circling around each other, Prez blowing the notes that sustained her as if he was the body to her soul, and then they came together in mid-air, as mating eagles will, and plummeted hundreds of feet earthward together, before breaking off and flying their separate ways. People in the control booth had tears in their eyes. It was the swan song of a bittersweet affection. After the show, the two had some brief backstage conversation and then they bid goodbye. They each had less than two years to live. Prez would die alone in a New York hotel, his body finally calling it quits. Not long after that, Holiday would be arrested on her deathbed for heroin possession.

One of the things I love most about this video is the body language. The postwar hipster headshake of Gerry Mulligan, almost purposefully out of tempo with Coleman Hawkins’ bluesy wails at 2:02; the “let-me-show-you-how-it’s-done” grin on Prez as he leaps in at 2:42; the utter ecstasy of rediscovery on Billie’s face at 2:56, the sincere appreciation for the younger generation evident in her approving nod toward Mulligan at 4:50, and the visible “oh my!” during Roy Eldridge’s solo at 7:20; Jazz performance has always been about the subtle visual cues, the tortoise to rock’s bombastic hare. With the aid of several television cameras at different angles, it becomes as much fun to watch the players as it is to listen to them.

Above all, though, this was Billie’s moment, her swan song after a rocky but prodigious career. More than most who claim it, she truly lived the blues. When she sings that final line about love being like a faucet – “Sometimes when you think it’s on baby, it has turned off and gone” - it breaks your heart and makes you go “mmm, hmmm” at the same time. Like I said, she takes the rug out from underneath you.

Happy Birthday Billie.