Billie Holiday, The Arranger! Part 1: Overview

This is my ninth post presenting my previously unpublished research on Billie Holiday. (You can easily find the others by scrolling through previous posts, from the bottom up.) In 2022, my Holiday research won The Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music Criticism. This is my fourth one to focus on details of her music, with more to come, because I was shocked to realize that out of the hundreds of articles and books written about her, none point to specific measures from specific recordings to analyze Holiday’s musical genius. Her music is usually discussed in very general terms, and much of the writing on her is about what she “represents.” But she was a real person, not a symbol—and she was a brilliant musician.

Today I will present another topic that has never been discussed: Who created her arrangements—that is, the format, stops and starts, tempo(s), beginnings and endings, for each song? As I will illustrate, the evidence shows that she was very involved in creating her own arrangements. In my last post I showed that Holiday’s arrangement of “All of Me” developed over the years. As I mentioned there, I believe that she developed many of her own arrangements. (This would not apply to her first recordings and gigs, where she was a sideperson, not the leader. But it would apply increasingly from the early 1940s onward.) She designed them for her usual accompaniment of “rhythm section”—piano, bass, and drums. When she performed with a larger group such as a big band, somebody was responsible for writing out her arrangements so that everyone could play them together. But it was still her arrangements that they performed.

What is the evidence? For one thing, her arrangements stayed the same even when she was on tour and performing with different rhythm sections. She did not always have her regular pianist there to tell the musicians what she wanted. In short, she must have told them herself. (Her pianist was usually Bobby Tucker from 1946 to ‘49, Carl Drinkard on and off from 1951 to ‘57, and Mal Waldron from 1957 to ‘59. But she often performed in situations without them.)

Conversely, when her arrangements evolved, they evolved even when she had her usual rhythm section. This suggests that she came up with new ideas while performing the same songs night after night. Of course, there probably was some collaboration, especially when a song was new to her. It’s certainly possible that one of her regular pianists (but not someone who played with her for just one or two gigs) could have made suggestions. She might have said, “I’d like a pause there,” and the pianist might have said “Maybe a longer pause would work even better?” or “How about a pause after the next phrase as well?”

But in most cases—and this is a key point—the changes she made in the songs are very personal. Can you really imagine anyone else telling her “At the end of ‘All of Me’ you should say ‘Hey Baby’”? Or do you seriously think that someone said to her, “At the end of ‘Them There Eyes’ you really should add ‘I’m looking for the boy with the wistful eyes.”?! It’s crazy to think that other people told her to do these things. Don’t you agree? Common sense tells me that these were her own inventions.

There is testimony as well, not in agreement on all the details, but agreeing that Billie took control to some extent at least. For example, pianist Oscar Peterson, who worked with her on JATP (Jazz at the Philharmonic) tours and on recordings, said she was very much in charge:

She was the person who put the arrangements together. She’d sort of sing little phrases that she wanted to hear Barney (Kessel, guitarist) play behind her. She’d let us know the way she’d like to tune to take a certain shape, and then she’d call for whomever she wanted to play the solos…She was in complete control as far as the music went.

(On pp.186-7 of the large booklet to the Complete Billie Holiday on Verve.)

However, Barney, in the same booklet (p.195), said that on recordings at least, “most of the direction” came from producer Norman Granz as to who should play when. But even he acknowledges that Billie gave directions now and then.

Besides, we are lucky enough to have access to recorded rehearsals and outtakes that sometimes capture her dictating the arrangements. (Most of these are issued in the same Verve box just mentioned.) On August 22, 1955, the day before a recording session, she is teaching her arrangements to pianist Jimmy Rowles and bassist Artie Shapiro, and it certainly is clear that she is telling them what she wants, not what someone else told her to do. For example, here she is telling them how to play her ending on “Everything Happens to Me.” And please notice that she calls it “My idea”:

We can also hear that aspect of collaboration that I mentioned, where she wishes she had more input from the pianist on the songs that she does not know. First, she teaches Jimmy and Artie her ending for Ellington’s “I Got It Bad (and That Ain't Good)”:

She wants two breaks between her phrases—“somebody play” and “somebody answer”— and suggests that maybe a trumpet could play during one of the breaks, and tenor sax during the other. Then at 0:25 she demonstrates by scat-singing during the two breaks. This time she ends by singing “I got it bad, and that ain’t pretty.” Please don’t misunderstand—she’s not suggesting that it’s not pretty! These are two different thoughts that run together, as in “I got it bad, and that ain’t…”—”this will be pretty.”

But then she complains, good-naturedly, that “I’m gonna kill this cat” Rowles because he is not helping her on this song—a song that was not part of her repertoire and which in fact she never ended up recording. Here is the audio of her speaking, and below is my transcription of what she says (the Verve booklet’s transcriptions have errors):

She says:

I’m gonna kill this cat, he ain’t gettin’ me an idea yet. Sitting up there letting me rack my brains—but you know what’s gonna happen, he’s going to make it his way real pretty for me. Why, I know what’s going to happen. He’s letting me sit up here and look like I’m a big shot—I’m arranging. He’s trying to make me feel good, he’s letting me be the arranger.

So, essentially she’s saying, “It’s OK, I’m used to being my own arranger, but you know a lot” (she’d first worked with Rowles in 1942, so she knew how capable he was) “and since this is a song I’ve never done, it would be nice if you offered some suggestions. But in any case I know that tomorrow at the recording you’ll play pretty for me.”

In the next post on this topic, I will focus on her arrangement of “Them There Eyes,” and on her connection with Louis Armstrong.

All the best,

Lewis