Diana Ross: Lady Sings The Blues : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Throughout a ten-year career of glamorizing what is essentially forgettable junk, Diana Ross has somehow managed to retain the fierce dignity that comes from knowing that you rise above your material. She has even emerged from the cynical tackiness of the Berry Gordy/Sidney Furie film version of Billie Holiday's "autobiography" (a book Holiday claimed never to have read) with full recognition of her dramatic abilities, her charm and intelligence put sharply into relief by a vacuous and goonish script that relies more on soapy melodrama and vicious stereotyping than on any sort of reality about what the life of Billie Holiday might have been like. As if the true story—ending with an arrest for possession on her deathbed—wasn't grisly enough.

Several older critics, people who grew up listening to Holiday, have suggested that even though Diana Ross was successful in capturing a part of the Holiday verve and sound, her performances should be expunged and purged in order not to blur memory any more than need be. Go back to the real Holiday, they say, and feel better rather than lingering on the strange and disquieting depression that comes after seeing this film.

In two senses they're right: The hoked-up luridness of the film deprives us of any true impression of what the lady and her music were all about, and adds insult to injury. The character Piano Man was probably meant to be an amalgam of Teddy Wilson and Lester Young and implicitly brings discredit to both; it's doubtful that bandleader Artie Shaw turned Holiday on to smack as does his counterpart in the film—etcetera ad nauseam. And the film leads one to forget that Holiday was a musician and not a professional junkie. You tend to forget about the sass and glory of "Miss Brown to You" or the emotive pain of "Billie's Blues" after watching Ross' Holiday tie off and get high on the toilet. The movie leaves out all the class: They can put it on television real soon.

The soundtrack record suffers from the association but still comes off as probably Diana Ross' most sophisticated recording. The first two sides of the double LP contain snatches of trenchant dialogue, guaranteed to bring back the drear of the film, interspersed with minute-length segments of song and Michel Legrand's always tawdry, kitsch-laden "love themes." The other two sides consist of Diana Ross emulating Holiday's recordings of the middle and late Forties, and strangely enough it works. She does 11 tunes in a style that's an honest compromise between an accurate representation of Holiday's horn-like whiskey voice and the way Diana Ross would naturally do these songs in front of a band on her own sessions. Her "Fine And Mellow" is good enough to make me prefer it over any of the numerous versions by Holiday; not so with "Lover Man," "Strange Fruit," "God Bless the Child" and others which I thought had almost died with the woman with whom they were so closely identified. But Ross succeeds brilliantly in their revival on record. Her bell-clear voice plus Motown's recording techniques give a welcome new spirit to the old tunes, dusting them off and bringing them back into the light. She does "Gimme a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer" with a light modern flair that is worlds away from the hoary touch that Holiday gave the tune, but which is still fun all the same. Comparatively ancient standards like "My Man" and especially "Good Morning Heartache" come off as among Ross' finest recordings, an irony that shouldn't be lost among old copies of "Baby Love" and "Where Did Our Love Go." What Diana Ross accomplishes here is to swing, no mean feat for most pop singers today. The big band she's got behind her does its share towards helping her out, peppered as it is with several California musicians who knew and worked with Holiday—trumpeters Sweets Edison and Cat Anderson, Buddy Collette in the reed section and bassist Red Callender, with arrangements by Benny Golson, Oliver Nelson and Gil Askey. On a couple of the smaller group numbers she's accompanied by a piano player named Chester Lane who propels her along with little jabs and clues much the same way Teddy Wilson or Eddie Heywood prompted Holiday.

These two sides—perhaps 30 minutes of music—is all the good that has emerged from the entire Holiday revival. It puts Diana Ross back into prominence, where she obviously belongs, and in doing so it brings us back to the music of Billie Holiday, which should never have needed any resuscitation in the first place.

Billie Holiday was a jazz singer, a vocal instrumentalist. From the earliest she maintained that she tried to sing the way Louis Armstrong played the trumpet. Unable to read music, she pitched her voice and phrased her lyrics as if her voice was a horn that could talk. Some didn't like what she did; Ethel Waters' famous appraisal of Holiday—"She sings like her shoes are too tight"—comes to mind. But her fellow jazzmen loved her stuff, and throughout most of her career Holiday usually commanded the best working musicians to emerge from the Swing Era. She and pianist Teddy Wilson broke new ground by being the first to take pop tunes and swing them, and in doing so she influenced every female pop singer who followed her, from Ella Fitzgerald to Nina Simone to Roberta Flack.

With the flush of renewed interest in Billie Holiday accompanying the success of Lady Sings the Blues, every recording company that has access to any Holiday material has churned out a reissue. Talk to a Holiday fanatic and most likely you'll get told that her peak years were her youngest and that her best recordings were those made in the first eight years that she worked, between 1936 and 1944. The available recordings support that notion, with certain major exceptions to be found in various recordings of concerts and broadcasts in the Fifties.

She recorded first for Columbia in 1936. The sessions were produced by John Hammond, but Hammond says that pianist Wilson was responsible for the music. "I gave her no direction at all. Teddy did everything, and was the most important guy in her life from that viewpoint."

God Bless the Child (Columbia G30782) is among the best of all the reissues, containing 28 sides recorded from 1936, when the 20-year-old Billie was signed by Columbia, to 1942 when the Petrillo ban on commercial recording took effect for the middle years of World War II. The Holiday sessions run by Wilson come down to us today as the essence of small group swing. The musicians include Lester Young, Johnny Hodges, Cootie Williams, Buck Clayton, Roy Eldridge, Jo Jones and others. The earliest material shows us a girl who at 20 was already a tough and disillusioned dame with a tendency towards sarcasm and defiance that put a deliberate edge on everything she sang. "Havin' Myself a Time" from 1938 is specially appealing, never having been released before. Six more tunes debut here also. Eight numbers are from a 1941 date led by Lester Young, including a classic "All Of Me," "God Bless the Child" (the earliest and best version) and "Georgia on My Mind," on which Wilson shines on a typically sparkling piano chorus. The whole set typifies the best of the young Holiday—light, rhythm-infected, that almost careless, reedy voice laced with subtle theatrics. But there's a marked difference even between the early and later sessions. On the Lester Young sessions she's less improvisatory, already more mature and professional, adept in an easy avocado swing that would be her trademark throughout the early Forties. Billie Holiday: Strange Fruit (Atlantic SD 1614) is made up of the 16 numbers that Holiday cut for Commodore—four in 1939 with the Frankie Newton Orchestra and 12 in 1944 with pianist Eddie Heywood. Just one LP, it is somewhat more compact and accessible than the Columbia set. The "Strange Fruit" that you hear is a little showy but you have to place it in the perspective of 1939 to appreciate the sense of what Lewis Allen's poem conveys. "Billie's Blues," "Fine And Mellow," "I Got a Right to Sing the Blues"—classic numbers at the top of her form, in low-key, handsome settings. Heywood was a fine accompanist and Big Sid Catlett's drumming always kept things moving just right. On these sessions she's beginning to get set in her ways: "I Cover the Waterfront" is typical with its almost too precise reading of the lyrics and a stylization that seems strained after a couple of listenings.

The other Holiday studio reissues are almost total write-offs. Decca's The Billie Holiday Story (DXSB 7161) has a couple of good moments (a terrific "Them There Eyes"), but most of the tunes, cut between 1944 and '49 with Sy Oliver, Bobby Hackett and Louis Armstrong, suffer from Hollywood arrangements and drown in a muck of strings and chorales. "God Bless the Child" is gruesomely murdered in this way. Verve's The Best of Billie Holiday (V6-8808) is Holiday in the years of her deterioration—it's about the worst of Billie Holiday. A couple of things from a 1952 session get slow and pretty treatments, but material from a 1957 session, two years before her death, is pretty grim.

But there are two LPs from this period on which Holiday is tackling a comeback and is superb: Lady Love (United Artists 5635) is a German concert from 1954. The seven cuts on side one are all fast and funky, topped by a bouncing, scatty "Them There Eyes." Side two is a jam on "Billie's Blues" with Red Norvo, Buddy DeFranco, Sonny Clark and others, hot stuff all the way. And starting a couple of years ago E.S.P. Disk started issuing a series of albums of various Holiday broadcasts. Billie Holiday Vol. 2 (ESP 3003) is 13 radio and TV broadcasts from 1953-1956, with not a dud on here. The most striking is a "Stormy Weather" at Carnegie Hall with Count Basie, Lester Young and Buck Clayton. Three cuts from Steve Allen's old Tonight show also illustrate that the essential touch this woman had was not as perishable as a set of tired. vocal chords. The Lady still lives in such thoughtful and pleasing recordings as this set.