BILLIE HOLIDAY The Improviser, Part 1: Overview, & "Embraceable You"

Billie Holiday is probably the most influential and best-known jazz singer of all time. Yet, it’s often hard to explain what makes her a jazz singer. There seems to be just about unanimous recognition that one of Holiday’s strengths was her improvising. But Billie never performed wordless improvisations, what jazz people call “scat singing,” where the voice improvises like an instrument.

For example, here’s Ella Fitzgerald improvising a “scat solo”—this is a little excerpt of “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” from a Jazz at the Philharmonic concert in Chicago, 1957:

Ella is probably the best-known jazz singer other than Billie, and of course she could also sing the lyrics of a slow ballad beautifully and respectfully, without scatting, as we’ll hear. But her scat singing was antithetical to Billie’s approach. Holiday never scatted like this, except sometimes in private to demonstrate a melody for her musicians. Here she is in a 1954 rehearsal:

Billie always maintained that her favorite singers when she was young were Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith. Yet, it’s a bit strange that the only Armstrong recording that she ever mentioned--and she did so repeatedly--was Louis’s brief vocal on “West End Blues,” from 1928, which is scat singing:

Here she discusses “West End Blues” with Mike Wallace, on Night Beat, Dumont TV Network (before 60 Minutes, on a network that is long gone),  November 8, 1956:

It’s difficult to hear the connection between Louis’ scat and her style. Probably part of the answer here is that one might be making too much of what she said. After all, she’s only talking about the first records she heard. Obviously she heard many other recordings afterward, by Armstrong and others, and heard singers in performance as she developed her style. Our earliest favorites from when we were children don’t define us for the rest of our lives.

 In any case, it’s clear that Holiday thought of herself as an improviser.  She told Nat Hentoff:
"I try to improvise like Prez, like Louis, or someone else I admire. I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That's all I know." (from Hentoff’s article, “The Real Lady Day”)

In that rehearsal from 1954, she talks about improvising with her pianist Jimmy Rowles and bassist Artie Shapiro. Here is my transcription of what she says:
”That’s why I can never sing the same way. I can’t do it because I’m never, I don’t always feel the same. I just can’t do it-- I can’t even copy me! (Laughs) Understand?” Rowles says “That’s good though.” And here is the audio clip:

In fact, Holiday was not exaggerating. She did improvise, and brilliantly. But she never did so with wordless scatting. She improvised while singing the lyrics, bringing out their meaning and depth to the fullest. Let’s hear some examples:

Gershwin’s “Embraceable You” has been recorded by many singers. Here’s the beginning of the written melody as sung straight, by Ella Fitzgerald (from her Gershwin Songbook, 1959, with Nelson Riddle’s arrangement).

Let’s compare that with two takes of “Embraceable You” as performed by Billie in 1944.

On the first take, she changes the opening melody for the words “Embrace me,” and she pronounces it as though it were “Yembrace me.” For the second phrase, “my sweet embraceable you,” she sings it the way Gershwin wrote it, but then adds a turn around the word “you.”

Just a few minutes later, she recorded a second take. This time, she sings the first three syllables the way they are written, but she makes up an entirely new melody for “My sweet embraceable you”:

Beautiful, yes?!

We’ll hear many more examples of Billie the improviser in future posts.

All the best,

Lewis