A while ago I blogged about a new playlist I put together of songs that
both these great vocalists recorded. While the arrangements mood and
intonation often differed I found it fascinating to listen to and
reflective of my knowledge that they both were on record stating that
each influenced the other. And now along comes this terrific piece in
the NYT that documents their interaction and communication more than I
ever knew or imagined. As an old fan of Billie and a new fan of
Frankie, whose recordings I have been recently exploring (not many
vocalists left I have yet to explore) nothing I have read recently has
excited warmed and stimulated me as much as this piece. Below is my
real time commenting, the link to the article and the full essay as
published in the New York Times.
A favorite tidbit is she called him "Frankie". 'I told him certain notes at the end he could bend.
... Bending those notes — that’s all I helped Frankie with.’’ Those
notes that Holiday told him to bend — they bent toward the boudoir."
‘It is Billie Holiday ... who was, and still remains, the greatest
single musical influence on me,’’ he said in 1958." I love this reference to "cunning" as follows: "Her approach to rhythm was cunning. She
meandered around the beat, slyly elongating and truncating syllables,
gliding down for a landing in surprising places. Sinatra was captivated
by the third song she ever recorded,
‘‘I Wished on the Moon,’’ a stock-standard Tin Pan Alley ballad that
Holiday, with deft tugs at the melody, transforms into something deeper:
a celebration of ecstatic new romance tinged with the melancholy
awareness that love fades." The following had me channeling Lauren Hill -
"that thing, that thing that ... " "As for Sinatra, even as a tyro — a
babyfaced 25-year-old fronting Tommy Dorsey’s band in a bow tie too big
for his string-bean frame — the throb in his song was unmistakable." Oh
yeah " that throb that throb that ..." Perchance does it reveal my 'youth" to
inquire what the f is a tyro? 2 Brilliant observations: "Of course, the message of Holiday and
Sinatra wasn’t just sex. It was pain. To put the matter in genre terms:
Both Holiday and Sinatra were torch singers. In Sinatra’s case, this was
a novelty. Torch singing had traditionally been women’s work, but his
records made the case that a bruiser in a fedora could love as hard,
could hurt as bad, as any dame." and Sinatra
is often celebrated as the swaggering Rat-Packer, Holiday as a tragic
balladeer. Yet it’s Holiday’s music that percolates with greater joie de
vivre, and Sinatra’s that scrapes darker depths. Here's
what I was trying to say in my earlier piece, only more observant
articulate nuanced and savvy: "One of my favorite parlor
games is to listen to the singers’ versions of the same songs: to hear
the hay that they both made of ‘‘All of Me’’ or ‘‘Day In, Day Out,’’ to
observe their different angles of attack on ‘‘Night and Day’’ —
Holiday’s playful and insouciant, Sinatra’s grand, booming, brooding.
Then there are those moments when the two giants directly address one
other. Sinatra was the acolyte, but the flow of influence reversed on
Holiday’s lavishly orchestrated ‘‘Lady in Satin’’ (1958), an homage to
Sinatra’s Capitol Records concept albums. Holiday made the connection
explicit by opening the LP with a tremulous version of ‘‘I’m a Fool to
Want You,’’ Sinatra’s signature torch song, co-written by the man
himself. A few years later, Sinatra answered back on a recording of the
standard ‘‘Yesterdays,’’ a Holiday staple. At the 1:11 mark of that
song, Sinatra sings the word ‘‘then,’’ unleashing a dramatically low and
rumbling descending vocal line. Keen-eared listeners picked it up right
away: This was Ol’ Blue Eyes doing his Billie Holiday impression. A
century after their births, Holiday and Sinatra are still talking to
each other. What a privilege it is to listen in."
Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday: They Did It Their Way
More than just contemporaries, Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday were mutual admirers who pushed each other musically.Credit
From left: Donaldson Collection/Getty Images; Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
In
life, the two may have been miles apart in circumstance and success.
But as each other’s great influences, they’ll be forever one.
BILLIE
HOLIDAY, née Eleanora Fagan, was born in Philadelphia, 100 years ago
this past April 7. Eight months later, on Dec. 12, 1915, Francis Albert
Sinatra arrived, about 95 miles up the coast in Hoboken, N.J. The birth
of these two great — arguably, greatest — popular singers, in the same
year, a century ago, might be deemed a cosmic fluke, an accident of
history. You could also call it history in action. They were born into a
still-primitive pop music universe, but changes were afoot. By the time
they turned pro, as teenagers in the 1930s, American music had been
reshaped by modernity: by the blues and jazz and suave Broadway pop, by
electrical recording and microphones and radio. This new brand of music
and set of technological tools were ideally suited to Holiday and
Sinatra’s talents — an artistry based on uncommon musical and emotional
intelligence and expressed through miraculously shrewd and subtle vocal
phrasing. Had Eleanora and Francis been born in another year, had they
come of age in a different musical world, they might never have become
Lady Day and the Voice.
They
were linked by more than just the coincidence of their birth year. We
associate Holiday and Sinatra with other muses and collaborators — she
with the saxophonist Lester Young, he with the arranger Nelson Riddle —
but throughout their careers, the singers exerted a powerful pull on one
another. Their paths crossed early. Sinatra first saw Holiday perform
sometime in the late ’30s; he became an instant devotee. In 1944,
Holiday told columnist Earl Wilson that she’d offered Sinatra advice on
his singing. ‘‘I told him certain notes at the end he could bend. ...
Bending those notes — that’s all I helped Frankie with.’’ Sinatra made
no secret of his debt to Holiday: ‘‘It is Billie Holiday ... who was,
and still remains, the greatest single musical influence on me,’’ he
said in 1958. In ‘‘Mr. S: My Life with Frank Sinatra,’’ from 2003,
George Jacobs, the singer’s former valet, writes that Sinatra visited
Holiday in her New York City hospital room in July 1959, shortly before
her death from drug and alcohol-related liver and heart disease. When
Holiday died, Sinatra holed up in his penthouse for two days, weeping,
drinking and playing her records.
The
Holiday-Sinatra bond, in other words, was a classic relationship of
guru and disciple. Certainly, Holiday was the more precocious of the
two. She began singing in Harlem jazz clubs at age 16 and cut her first
records as an 18-year-old in 1933. By the time she returned to the
studio in 1935, she was a revelation — neither the white balladeers who
dominated the Hit Parade nor the black blues queens from whose ranks she
emerged provided a precedent for her. By traditional measures, she
didn’t have much of an instrument. Her voice was small and slight. She
delivered songs in a midrange drawl that cracked and creaked when she
ventured north and south — a bit shrill in the upper register, a touch
hoarse on the low end. Yet the result was inviting and beguiling. Like a
cool enveloping mist, it was a sound to get lost in."
Her
approach to rhythm was cunning. She meandered around the beat, slyly
elongating and truncating syllables, gliding down for a landing in
surprising places. Sinatra was captivated by the third song she ever
recorded, ‘‘I Wished on the Moon,’’
a stock-standard Tin Pan Alley ballad that Holiday, with deft tugs at
the melody, transforms into something deeper: a celebration of ecstatic
new romance tinged with the melancholy awareness that love fades.
Sinatra signing an autograph for Holiday in the 1940s.
On
that record, as on so many others, you can hear Holiday batting bedroom
eyes. She was a beautiful woman, but it was her husky voice, and the
knowledge of earthly pleasures that it conveyed, that made her a sex
symbol. As for Sinatra, even as a tyro — a babyfaced 25-year-old
fronting Tommy Dorsey’s band in a bow tie too big for his string-bean
frame — the throb in his song was unmistakable. From Holiday, he’d
learned that, ideally, musical seduction was a subtle art. His come-ons
were staked on telling details: minute vocal shading, delicately dabbed
colors, the teasing extra half-beat pause before the headlong plunge
into the chorus. Those notes that Holiday told him to bend — they bent
toward the boudoir.
Of
course, the message of Holiday and Sinatra wasn’t just sex. It was
pain. To put the matter in genre terms: Both Holiday and Sinatra were
torch singers. In Sinatra’s case, this was a novelty. Torch singing had
traditionally been women’s work, but his records made the case that a
bruiser in a fedora could love as hard, could hurt as bad, as any dame.
He proclaimed himself an ‘‘18-karat manic depressive,’’ and you could
hear it even in up-tempo songs like his tumultuous 1956 version of ‘‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’’:
the singer gusting from ecstasy to despair and back again, along the
crests and crashes of Riddle’s orchestrations. His ballads cut even
deeper. On albums like ‘‘In the Wee Small Hours,’’ Sinatra cast himself
as a noir gumshoe, pursuing an insoluble case: ‘‘What is this thing
called love? ... Who can solve its mystery?’’ Holiday played a more
traditional role. In ‘‘My Man,’’ ‘‘Don’t Explain’’
and other torch ballads, she was the bruised diva, doomed to
masochistic love with callous men. But there was more: a spirit of
resiliency and unflappable cool in the face of cruelty you could detect
in all her music, from the most standard pop-jazz genre fare to the
anti-lynching anthem ‘‘Strange Fruit.’’ In Holiday’s hands, a torch song was also a protest song.
The
fates of the two singers can stand as a parable about race in
20th-century America. Holiday was an adored cult artist who never
reached superstardom during her lifetime. When she died, at age 44, she
had 70 cents in her bank account. She spent her last days in Manhattan’s
Metropolitan Hospital under police guard; she’d been placed under
arrest in her hospital bed, on drug possession charges. Sinatra outlived
his hero by 39 years. He released dozens of albums, including a few of
the best ever made, and a handful of duds, too. He was feted by
presidents and died a multimillionaire.
Today,
Holiday and Sinatra are so shrouded in myth it can be hard to see them
clearly. But when you listen to their records, the clouds part.
Frequently, you find them playing against type. Sinatra is often
celebrated as the swaggering Rat-Packer, Holiday as a tragic balladeer.
Yet it’s Holiday’s music that percolates with greater joie de vivre, and
Sinatra’s that scrapes darker depths. One of my favorite parlor games
is to listen to the singers’ versions of the same songs: to hear the hay
that they both made of ‘‘All of Me’’ or ‘‘Day In, Day Out,’’ to observe
their different angles of attack on ‘‘Night and Day’’ — Holiday’s
playful and insouciant, Sinatra’s grand, booming, brooding. Then there
are those moments when the two giants directly address one other.
Sinatra was the acolyte, but the flow of influence reversed on Holiday’s
lavishly orchestrated ‘‘Lady in Satin’’ (1958), an homage to Sinatra’s
Capitol Records concept albums. Holiday made the connection explicit by
opening the LP with a tremulous version of ‘‘I’m a Fool to Want You,’’
Sinatra’s signature torch song, co-written by the man himself. A few
years later, Sinatra answered back on a recording of the standard
‘‘Yesterdays,’’ a Holiday staple. At the 1:11 mark of that song, Sinatra
sings the word ‘‘then,’’ unleashing a dramatically low and rumbling
descending vocal line. Keen-eared listeners picked it up right away:
This was Ol’ Blue Eyes doing his Billie Holiday impression. A century
after their births, Holiday and Sinatra are still talking to each other.
What a privilege it is to listen in.
A version of this article appears in print on October 25, 2015, on page M2132 of T Magazine with the headline: They Did It Their Way
The New York Times recently celebrated its historic accomplishment of achieving 1 million digital subscribers, including me, by asking for reader feedback. At the link, is the column from the NYT Public Editor to which I responded below.
You asked for it, you'll get it! But
before I start on what's wrong, I'll tell you what's right and why I
care. And before that, a little about me. I fled LA County ASAP for
Berkeley at 18, then San Francisco, which for a time seemed like Oz. I
spent 38 years working for the Federal government, most of them
enforcing civil rights laws for US Dept HEW then Health & Human
Services, Office for Civil Rights, returning to city of LA to help open
OCR's first and only Field Office in LA during the glory years of govt
service aka the Clinton Administration under the leadership of the most
brilliant and devoted genius in govt service, now the Sec of Labor, Tom
Perez. Eventually I bought a house, retired, and started writing
liberated from govt editors but not from my penchant for gratuitous
comments, run on sentences, or needlessly long comments.
I
am devoted to the NYT because, other than possibly The New Yorker,
published weekly, there is no better written media journal anywhere.
Your closest competitors mere ghosts of their former selves, the LA
Times deteriorated into not much more than a tabloid without corporate
support or the resources to allow the few journalists left to conduct
the minimum amount of research necessary to complete an article, and the
Washington Post chasing it downward as quickly as it can. I rarely
read the sports pages, but even there when I find something of interest I
find quality writing. Someday someone needs to beatify and bestow
deserved sainthood on perhaps the best writer and critic in journalism
anywhere, Stephen Holden. No one writes better.
I smirked
as I read your lead in this column thinking to myself surely your editor
is a self absorbed jerk masquerading as a considerate editor only
concerned with pleasing readers rather than increasing corporate profit
but indeed I feel more and more often a cog in the corporate drive to
make more and more money. And I do understand that profit is necessary
to publish the high quality publication I love. And perhaps as some
have said I am not like anyone else so my views lie outside the core of
reader sentiment and that's OK too. I subscribe to and read the digital
edition as if it were the printed edition. Maybe I am old fashioned. I
look through the articles - my favorite starting point is Today's Paper
- and choose from there which article to read when in what order. I
have the impression you would like to eliminate that link. Of course I
check the main page site for more updated news. But - and every other
newspaper is worse at this - I resent feeling like the NYT thinks I am
an idiot unable to navigate through your sections to find the articles I
find of interest, rather than what some unseen viral presence seems to
want me to read. And granted as I did not grow up with this technology I
am not as savvy as others but even i can find my way around a web
site. It seems like I can't even read one sentence of an article when
up pops demands to read this, go here, go there, and I just want to
scream for gosh sake leave me the heck alone and let me finish reading
what I started. I may or may not choose your viral ghost's selection
next. But I can find what I want. And if NYT is making a profit at
getting readers to accept your suggestion of a "new" way to read the
publication, or wish to subscribe to additional features for behind the
scenes materials, go for it, but without me.
I don't want a new way to
read a newspaper. Nor am I looking for more to read. I prefer not to
spend 24/7 with my eyes glued to a computer, tablet, cell phone, ad
nauseam, I like to have time to spend interacting with real people in
real time. I fear the next generation will be unable to communicate
with other people directly or even write, but that is not for me to
worry about. And I will grant that I am not so self absorbed to think
that you can remove all these annoying popups just for me while
maintaining them for readers that provide NYT with income. But in part
this is because you have given me the opportunity to gripe and I have
been wanting to complain about all this for a long time, petty as it may
seem.
Perhaps more substantively, i find the absence of
women from the top ranks of editors to the number of reporters slants
and demeans coverage of women leaders, Hillary Clinton in particular.
And those few you have delight in skewering other women. Wouldn't it be
interesting if her editor told Maureen Dowd to refrain from writing one
more column about Clintons or Bushes for 6 months - a year? Do you
think she could still produce a weekly column some readers would find of
interest? Fine if she hates Hillary so much but her demeaning
condescending tone reeks of upper class snobbery.
On the news pages -
twice now I have seen a similar headline - "Hillary says she opposes
pipeline" and another I have forgotten. Really have you ever said that
when a male politician announces a decision or position. I am sure your
editor will excuse it by saying the word "says" is shorter than
"announces" but it reeks of a negative condescending demeaning tone that
questions her sincerity unfairly. If you all think she is
opportunistic, publish a column about it on the opinion pages. Why
can't you just publish "Clinton opposes pipeline"? Succinct, brief and
accurate.
Now on to your celebrity or perhaps performing
artists' interviews. You already got deservedly raked over the coals
for the Taye Diggs interview so I don't need to pile on. I'll give 2
examples of what I see as backsliding. The recent interview with Aretha
Franklin regarding her performance for the Pope. Does NYT employ that
interviewer? A more insulting interview lacking in even one worthy
question of substance I have never read. It is only due to her stature
and maturity that she did not throw a fit worthy of Nicki Minaj and
throw him out. For example, "Aretha, why did you choose to sing Amazing
Grace for the Pope?" Really? You are expecting "When A Man Loves A
Woman" or "Freeway of Love"? It's like Wolf Blitzer asking the military
this morning "how dangerous would it be if terrorists acquire nuclear
weapons?" Ask a 3 year old; these people have more important things to
do. Compare it to her interview published at Philly.com for an
interesting interview of substance with merely an overlay of puffery.
Of
course, I mention the feature on Nicki just published today and about
to compete with your Taye Diggs feature for reader reaction. I have
nothing to add to the comments of Nicki and the interviewer at the end.
But my observation is to wonder if you go through that article, how
much of it included actual quotes from Nicki Minaj spoken during that
interview rather than from other sources? A paragraph's worth, if
that? The interviewer actually seems to me a fairly good writer with
legitimate ideas worth exploring, in a creative essay. She could have
written a commentary on the subjects she wished to explore regarding the
role of women in rap, the evolution of rap, feminism, misogyny,
relationships with male paramours, friends, and/or peers who are
performing artists. But that is different than an in depth
interview lacking in questions that engage the interviewee sufficiently
to result in an article or interview worthy of publication.
