on Bitter Crop: the Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holiday’s Last Year by Paul Alexander
In an essay published in the New York Review of Books in 1976, Elizabeth Hardwick reflected on her friend Billie Holiday who had died 17 years earlier in 1959. She wrote, “Murderous dissipation went with the music, inseparable, skin and bone. And always her luminous self-destruction … The sheer enormity of her vices. The outrageousness of them. For the grand destruction one must be worthy. Her ruthless talent and opulent devastation.” In this telling, Holiday’s habits comprised a magnificent defiance of the inevitable, whether the punishments were imposed by the FBI, the news media, abusive men and greedy managers, or pushers. Paul Alexander’s Bitter Crop peers at and celebrates her persistence and performances during that final year. Along the way, he vividly recounts the “perennial hardships” Holiday encountered – all of which dogged her to the very end.
The book’s title is taken from the final stanza of “Strange Fruit,” the anti-lynching song composed by Abel Meeropol in 1937 and recorded by Holiday in 1939 – “Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck / For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck / For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop / Here is a strange and bitter crop.” This song of protest “was sung at leftist gatherings” and, for the FBI, connected Holiday to the Communist Party of which Meeropol was a member. J. Edgar Hoover, who feared the song for the unrest it could generate, set out to ruin Holiday whose drug use provided a convenient pretext for repeated arrests. The final arrest occurred while she lay dying from liver and kidney failure at Manhattan’s Knickerbocker Hospital. But also, she signed a contract to sing in a movie and accepted an offer from Confidential magazine to tell her story of heroin use. She was aware that her legacy was at risk.
Nevertheless, in 1959 Holiday continued to perform, one date after another, just as she had always done. “What kept Billie going was the next gig,” says Alexander, “and the gig after that. It was her longing to move on to whatever was to come – a show, a recording session, a television appearance – that allowed her to cling to her unwavering sense of hope.” I’m not so certain about “unwavering” – but Alexander doesn’t indulge in hagiography, and manages to strike a balance between Holiday’s refusal to express herself as a victim (when telling her own story, when singing) and her antagonists’ view of her as a target. Most interesting to me are Holiday’s influences on and connections to others – Frank Sinatra (“It is Billie Holiday … who was and still remains the greatest single musical influence on me”), Sonny Rollins, Françoise Sagan, and Hardwick.
[Published by Knopf on February 13, 2024, 353 pages, $32.00 US hardcover]
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on The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins, edited by Sam V. H. Reese
The late pianist Wanda Landowska made it into the book of quotations with her declaration “I never practice. I always play.” With Sonny Rollins, the opposite pertains. Aiden Levy’s Rollins biography, Saxophone Colossus (2022), quotes one of Rollins’ memories as a nine-year old: “I just loved to play and I would get in the closet and blow for hours – nine, ten hours, and I would get lost in my own reverie, in the sound.” To think of Rollins as perpetually practicing puts his legendary break from recording in 1960 and his playing to the traffic on the Williamsburg Bridge into proper perspective. (At age 30, he was still practicing in his closet, and departed for the bridge to give his neighbors a break.) Levy’s book allows us to see Rollins as obsessively immersed in his solitary experiences – and in efforts to enhance his spiritual and musical life. Just before quitting the recording studio, he told Nat Hentoff, “I’m not satisfied with any of my playing. I know what I want. I can hear it.” After addiction and incarceration in Riker’s Island, he turned to yoga, improving his diet, studying the Kabbalah, and Rosicrucianism – and through it all, his longstanding belief that “I really wasn’t good enough for myself” drove him to improve.
In his introduction to The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins, Sam Reese tells us that Rollins’ archives at the New York Public Library include six “hefty” boxes of notebooks. Rollins once said that jazz is “like the sky – it’s never the same two days in a row” and that to be able to improvise he needed to have “my rudiments ready to go whenever the spirit hits me.” In these notebook excerpts, I hear someone tending to the rudiments; the intentions are exhortative, rousing, admonishing – but repetitive, not various in attitude. He creates rules of engagement with himself, and speaks of making “progress” with his “present policies.” It is as if governance itself is his goal. The topics vary: notes on playing and performance, lists, remarks on daily routines, observations on his health, quasi-poetic lines, definitions, prayers.
Some samples:
“Don’t worry about the race, worry about the pace.”
“Favorites: ‘I’m Gonna Sit Righty Down and Write Myself a Letter,’ Fats Waller – ‘The Man I Love,’ Coleman Hawkins – ‘Lover Man,’ Billie – ‘Beautiful Moons Ago,‘ King Cole Trio – ‘Another Hair Do,’ Charlie Parker – ‘Afternoon of a Basie-ite,’ Lester Young”
“Forgive everyone everything.”
“By weight: If you were at 182. Being at 182 for instance does not mean the same depending upon the shrinkage factor presently existing in the body. There is a way of just being at 182 but with the cells being faster and more open to fat intake so that you will tend to go in the upper direction from 182. Then you can be at 182 but have your cells more empty so that they will just maintain 1282 but will tend to go in the downward direction from 182.”
“Knowledge has never let us down.”
“Philosophy point A. ‘The only thing worth doing is nothing.’ Philosophical counter B. ‘Only the “peace” of “nothing” can be attained through only action.’”
If you’re an admirer of Rollins’ recordings, you will probably find the entries on playing the sax of greatest interest. Some of his notes are technical in nature. And some are more reflective: “I am proud to be a member of the saxophone fraternity. Despite the derision with which this mystical hybrid of an instrument was initially received it has captured all! And stands today ready to lead us into the musical future!”
[Published by New York Review Books on March 12, 2024, 172 pages, $17.95 US paperback]
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on Hired Guns: Portraits of Women in Alternative Music by Amanda Kramer and Wayne Byrne
Hired Guns is based on extensive interviews and correspondence with 10 women who have enjoyed notable careers and experiences in the music business and in genres including jazz, rock, classical, punk, and pop. Although the business is male-dominated, these testaments are not primarily inspired by feminist perspectives, though they certainly detail what it takes to survive creatively and emotionally in those worlds. Editors Amanda Kramer (keyboardist for the Psychedelic Furs) and Wayne Byrne (author and teacher) sought to “detail how their distinctive approach to the craft and subsequent career was informed by time, place, family, and other personal factors.” Some of the musicians were classically trained, others were autodidacts. Thus, each profile considers a life in its entirety, as well as the relationships, practices and performances of these artists.
There is bass player Clare Kenny who has performed with Sinead O’Connor, Edwyn Collins, and the Indigo Girls, and who started her career in the reggae band Amazulu: “We started out as very rootsy and very serious, we were mixed race, we wrote songs about Greenham Common. We did have some memorable times together, such as being thrown into prison in Finland.” There is Gail Ann Dorsey who performed regularly in David Bowie’s for two decades until his final tour in 2004. But in both cases, and typical of everyone profiled in Hired Guns, the women discuss their evolutions as musicians at length, and then focus on what it took to blend with the aspirations and methods of band leaders and record producers. This isn’t a book of tell-all secrets and bad behavior, though there is some to speak of along the way.
There is singer and keyboard player Joy Askew who has performed alongside Peter Gabriel, Phoebe Snow, Rodney Crowell, Jack Bruce, and Quincy Jones. In 1984, fresh off touring with Joe Jackson, she was contacted by Laurie Anderson’s engineer with an invitation to play. She says, “I started working with Laurie in 1984 and that was one of the biggest changes that happened with me, it was a major plunge into digital technology. Laurie was way ahead of the curve. She played a Synclavier and was using an original vocoder. On her shows I had a Prophet V, a DX-7, and a Mini Moog.”
There is Minneapolis-born Lori Barbero, an alt-rocker drummer who played with Babes in Toyland which she formed in 1987, and who then worked as Courtney Love’s assistant, as a production manager and as a festival coordinator. She didn’t have a drum kit until 1986, a purchase made after witnessing the drummer at the Minneapolis venue The Uptown: “I became a heavy-duty mouth-breather because my jaw would just drop watching the drummer because there was something captivating about watching all four limbs do different things at once. It was like watching this human machine, it just made me hot and horny … I had no idea what the individual drums were called, I didn’t know what a hi-hat was or what a ride cymbal was …”
In her introduction, Jennifer Finch writes, “Within each tale, a common thread is to be teased: Steadfastness.”
[Published by Equinox Publishing on March 15, 2024, 176 pages, $$35.00 US hardcover]
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on 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan
“You can be martyrs for an idea that died over a half a century if y’all want,” remarked Nicholas Payton in “On Why Jazz Isn’t Cool Anymore.” He wrote that fuming essay in 2011, pronouncing “Jazz is dead … Here lies Jazz (1916 – 1959).” His ire was triggered in part by the avidity of the mainly white audience’s then five-decade long avidity for Miles Davis’ album Kind of Blue, recorded in March and April of 1959 – and the maintenance of “jazz” as an inert category in which the musicians are slaves laboring for colonists with no appreciation for evolving, creative expression. As James Kaplan shows in 3 Shades of Blue, the emergence of Miles Davis as a post-bebop icon stemmed from the record industry’s mission to offer a sound for a broader audience.
Payton claims, “Miles personified cool and he hated jazz” — and Miles’ post-1959 music may support that claim. But he was complicit in making those sonic decisions with George Avakian, a Columbia records exec who handed Miles, then addicted to heroin, a contract in 1955. Kaplan writes, “’Those who had heard of Miles at all then mostly thought of him as a bebop player,’ Avakian told The Wall Street Journal … And from the beginning, Avakian had little interest in bebop: ‘I knew it would never connect on a large scale,’ he said. ‘It was ingenious music but far too complicated for the average ear and too hard for the mass market to follow the melodies.’”
Now 4x-platinum and still going strong, Kind of Blue is the biggest selling jazz album of all time. Kaplan tracks its emergence from the various sounds of Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, and Coleman Hawkins. “For sixty years and more, jazz and popular music had consisted of songs that told stories,” Kaplan writes, “either explicitly – in lyrics – or in their construction. The most common song framework in both genres was known as AABA: two choruses followed by a bridge, followed by an outchorus … Popular songs, which became the explicit or implicit basis for jazz tunes, were written in a given key … they tended, satisfyingly, to come back to that first chord …But with Miles, in life and in art, it [a story] was always the thing withheld. And the essence of modal music – the essence of “So What” — was that you had no idea how it turned out. Which was pretty much the way the world was looking at that moment …” Modal music rejected chord structure. And Kind of Blue, dispensing with popular song, is based on original compositions.
The ”3” in 3 Shades of Blue refers to Miles, pianist Bill Evans and saxophonist John Coltrane – who were joined by Cannonball Adderley on sax, Paul Chambers on bass, and drummer Jimmy Cobb. Wynton Kelly, who had played piano previously with Miles, returned for the bluesy “Freddie Freeloader.” Emphasizing Miles, Kaplan also offers extended looks at the lives of Evans and Coltrane. The story of how the album was made has been told before and in greater detail, but Kaplan ably describes the scene, fitting it into a conventional but quick-paced biographical take. The cooler sounds of this new music suggested introspection and melancholy – and they have not been abandoned. So as not to ignore other changes afoot in jazz, Kaplan also considers Ornette Coleman’s innovations and Sonny Rollins’ music.
The final parts of the book follow the three main figures into their demise in the 1970s. Miles is described as “a severely debilitated, agoraphobic, forty-nine-year old.” Cicely Tyson shows up “applying the considerable force of her personality to purging his house of louche characters and cleaning Miles himself up. She brought him healthy food, introduced him to vegetables, told him he had to quit smoking or she wouldn’t kiss him.” Kaplan has tried to balance the music with the lurid-life elements, but there is rather too much of the latter here. Still, he says in his introduction, “I confess that in the genres of bebop and hard bop, jazz created in the quarter century between, roughly, 1942 and 1967, I find almost all the jazz that I want and need.” One can almost hear Payton gagging in the background. But Kaplan is fascinated by the “annus mirabilis” of 1959 as the acme of this period, and his enthusiasm makes for a lively take.
[Published by Penguin Press on March 5, 2024, 496 pages, $35.00 US hardcover]
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More Book Notes on Music Titles by Ron Slate —
to access reviews of Brad Meldau’s memoir Formation, Sly Stone’s Memoir, Becoming Ella Fitzgerald by Judith Tick & Rock ‘n Roll in JFK’s America, click here
to access reviews of Aiden Levy’s biography of Sonny Rollins, Distant Melodies: Music in Search of Home by Edward Dusinberre, Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs by Greil Marcus & Musical Landscapes in Color: Conversations with Black American Composers by William C. Banfield, click here