Billie Holiday singing

Billie Holiday

4.7.15

Billie HolidayThe legendary vocalist Billie Holiday was born 100 years ago today. Though a household name nowadays, she struggled to achieve the same notoriety as singers like Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald.

Strongly influenced by Armstrong and Bessie Smith, her style was a hit in Harlem. Mainstream audiences took a while to come around.

Early in her career, one Chicago club manager took her aside and told her she sang too slow, dragged the tempo and missed the beat. She offered to cut him a deal: “I’ll sing for free if you let me sing the way I sing.” He refused, and she walked.

As Holiday’s career began to take off, she found herself singing alongside some of the prominent Big Band leaders of the team — Teddy Wilson (1935-1938), Count Basie (late 1937), and Artie Shaw (1938).

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Billie Holiday w/ Artie Shaw's Orchestra

Billie Holiday & Artie Shaw’s Orchestra

Like other black performers at the time, Holiday faced racial discrimination, often at the hands of stage managers, hotel owners and others who took issue with black singers mingling with white musicians. But her bandmates would be the first to stand up for her.

Billie Holiday once told singer Rosemary Clooney of a time when Holiday performed with Artie Shaw’s orchestra in Kentucky. There wasn’t a hotel in town willing to rent her a room.

“So Artie put eight of the boys around me and marched me into the lobby of the biggest hotel in town, like the ‘Queen Mary’ surrounded by tugboats. The clerk couldn’t imagine that a black woman would walk in like that with white men. He thought I was Spanish or something, so I got a nice room.”

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Billie Holiday’s calm, laid-back vocal style masked a troubled story inside of her. Born to a 13-year-old mother, raised mostly by her grandmother, and jailed at a young age for prostitution, Billie Holiday first sang to make a living, not necessarily to pursue a passion.

The hardships that underlined many aspects of her life were evident in some of the songs she recorded– if not cloaking her voice as she sang, then illustrated in the lyrics of songs like “Strange Fruit” and “Gloomy Sunday.”

She struggled with an addiction to narcotics and ultimately succumbed to the effects of cirrhosis on July 17, 1959.

Her legacy lives on today as her recordings are remastered and re-released, and top hits like “God Bless the Child” and “What A Little Moonlight Can Do” are among the most-covered songs in her repertoire.

Tune into The Heavy Petting Zoo on Saturday, April 11 from 7:00-9:00 p.m. (Central)
for a special tribute to Billie Holiday.

Sources:
– BOOK: Girl Singer by Rosemary Clooney
– BOOK:Giants Of Jazz by Studs Terkel
– WEB: “Billie Holiday” – Wikipedia

“Snow” Fight!

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In honor of December, and HPZ’s annual “White Christmas Pre-Christmas Countdown to Christmas,” I present a head-to-head match-up of music that I hope will inspire just a tiny bit of wintery precipitation to fall before too long. So in a similar vein to HPZ Co-Star Paul Snyder’s “Vs.” music blog series, I hereby present: Snow” Fight!

The basis for such a debate stems from a contract dispute that kept White Christmas star Rosemary Clooney off of the semi-official movie soundtrack recording. Clooney, a successful artist in her own right by 1954, was signed into an exclusive contract with Columbia Records. Meanwhile, Decca owned the rights to the music used in the film. As a result, Clooney was pulled from the Decca recording, despite being an integral part of the White Christmas cast.  She was replaced by Peggy Lee.

You might remember this scene from the film: Bob Wallace (Bing Crosby), Betty Haynes (Clooney), Phil Davis (Danny Kaye), and Judy Haynes (Vera Ellen) are on a train bound for Vermont, and one thing they can’t wait to see is snow. So of course they sing about it. And in case you couldn’t guess from the fact that Vera Ellen’s voice magically drops an octave whenever she sings, her voice is dubbed by singer Trudy Stevens (Ellen was famous for dancing, not singing).

But what to make of the recordings released after the film’s production? From the Decca label, we are treated to a version of “Snow” that contains the same four-part harmonies as in the film — and even an orchestral interpretation of a choo-choo train — but Peggy Lee magically appears and Clooney is nowhere to be heard.

Meanwhile, Clooney recorded her own solo version of the song with a softer orchestral accompaniment in the background, sprinkled with back-up vocals by an anonymous chorus of male singers. The four-part harmony is lost, but this arrangement has a smoother, more lighthearted quality to it.

Given that there was never an “official” soundtrack for the film, we must settle for alternate recordings. So which do you think is better — a musical arrangement that sticks pretty closely to the original score but swaps one big-name girl singer for another, or one that allows the film’s original star to exercise her talents on a song she’d earlier been barred from recording with her castmates? Is anything lost by plucking Clooney out of the Decca recording and plugging in Peggy Lee? Is Clooney’s solo recording undermined by the absence of Crosby, Kaye, and Stevens?

Take a listen to these tracks & vote for your favorite!

Take 1 — “Snow” – Crosby, Kaye, Lee, and Stevens

Take 2 — “Snow” – Rosemary Clooney


Poll was closed and MP3s were removed on Saturday, December 5, 2009.

The Cole Porter Story

Cole Porter Story

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For years, a copy of The Cole Porter Story, as told to Richard G. Hubler, has been tucked away on the bookshelf of the headboard of my grandma’s guest bed upstairs.  It appears to be stolen from a library, but hey, I never said my grandma was a saint, okay?

Though written by Hubler, the book is technically an autobiography, with biographical appendices filling the latter half.  According to Hubler, this is the story of Porter’s life straight from the horse’s mouth.  Per a mutual agreement during the creation of the manuscript, it remained unpublished and locked away until Porter’s death.  Sounds juicy, no?

Alas… This is 1965 we’re talking about.  Undoubtedly, our measure of controversy has changed since then, but I suppose Porter wouldn’t have wanted to mar our image of the soft-spoken, mild-mannered Fred Astaire with accounts of his backstage feuds prior to the opening of The Gay Divorce, for example.  It’s much easier to arrange for someone else to drop these alleged bombshells after you’re not around to deal with the backlash (note to you future autobiographers).

So rather than expecting any controversy, the reader should be satisfied to hear Porter speak of his approach to composing.  He reports, “I must make a bow to the French, who taught me to use the extra phrase in music and to lighten my writing; to the English, who gave me relatively little except the warning never to speed up a tune for the sake of jazz.  It was Africa that gave me basic beats, Bali that taught me the value of changing tempos and keys.  Italy supplied the idea of pure melody, and Egypt the Oriental scale.”  And he goes on.

Porter also identifies for us his two favorite compositions:  Night and Day (really, Cole? Even Astaire complained about that song), composed while in Germany; and Begin the Beguine ( Hat Tip: Artie Shaw ), inspired by a war-dance chant he heard in the East Indies.

And while Cole Porter’s legacy lives on as a result of his surplus of standard hits, we hear of the repeated failures and rejections he faced early on in his career.  In 1931, after spending three months on a 20-song score (not identified by name in the book), he received news that the show wouldn’t go on — a new cigarette tax scared their production’s tobacco industry sponsor to pull out of the show.  And let’s not forget that songs like Love For Sale were banned from TV and Radio due to their lyrics and subject matter.  Coincidentally, a quick search of this site shows that “Love For Sale” has only been played once on the Heavy Petting Zoo.

Autobiographies are often an interesting way to learn about other people besides the main subject of the book.  Porter describes his impressions of Astaire, Danny Kaye, and Ethel Merman (“She had a voice like a trombone and a manner as ingratiating as a performance of a three-ring circus.”), to name a few.

Rosemary Clooney wrote in her autobiography, Girl Singer, that she once sang Porter’s song, “Don’t Fence Me In,” at a concert late in her career.  After the show, a fan approached her and exclaimed, “I never knew Cole Porter was a feminist!”  It’s possible that one could interpret the closing lyrics of the Bing Crosby/Andrews Sisters version of “Don’t Fence Me In,” for example, as a shout-out to feminism — “Papa, don’t you fence me in.”  Likewise if a solo female sang it proudly.  But in fact, according to Porter, the song really had no deep meaning whatsoever.  He bought the lyrics for $200 from a cowhand, “wrote the tune with [his] cheek stuffed with tongue,” and employed every Western cliche he could think of.  Nevertheless, it’s one of my favorites.

While autobiographies have their merits, this book provides one good example of an autobiography’s disadvantage.  When one is writing about oneself, how credible can the information be?  Some stories get exaggerated and other facts are suppressed.

Anybody who’s read anything objectively researched and reported about Porter knows of his homosexual liaisons, but you’d never know about them if your research began and ended with The Cole Porter Story.  Instead, we get to know Porter as a man deeply in love with his wife, devastated when she passes away.  While there’s no reason to disbelieve this as fact, there’s clearly more to the real Cole Porter story.

You can’t blame him for remaining guarded, though:  That’s a pretty big bombshell to drop in 1965, even for a dead guy.

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Cole Porter silk stockings

Click here to learn more about Cole Porter

They came a long way from St. Louis

fancy

Fans of the Heavy Petting Zoo know that I have a special place in my heart for Rosemary Clooney. My friends know this too (how could they not?), and upon a recent stop in Chicago, two good friends surprised me with some finds from a local record resale shop. Among the treasures was Fancy Meeting You Here — an entire LP of duets recorded by Rosemary Clooney and her White Christmas co-star, Bing Crosby.

In her autobiography, Girl Singer, Clooney writes about how Fancy Meeting You Here was her favorite recording project of her entire career. Recorded in 1958, Clooney was six months pregnant with her fourth child when she stepped into the studio with Crosby.

Crosby, not at all pregnant, still suffered from the occasional mood swing. According to Clooney, when guests entered the control room during their recording session, Crosby turned his back to the glass and stared at the wall. Clooney approached and asked what was the matter.

“Do you want a break? Do you want a sandwich?” she asked.

Crosby responded, “I want those people out of the control room, and then I want a sandwich.”

Well, however cranky Crosby was, we cannot tell by listening to this fun collection of travel-themed ditties. On this record, you’ll find what are arguably some of the catchiest arrangements of a few of the well-known songs that made their way to the charts in the 1940s and 1950s.

Clooney and Crosby deliver a rendition of “On A Slow Boat To China” that blows anything the Andrews Sisters ever did right out of the Pacific. The number begins on a hyper note, but as it advances to the first verse, the song becomes a delicate vocal dance. The occasional stereotypical musical theme meant to depict the Orient, which today wouldn’t be considered politically correct, is a bit unfortunate.

Other quality tracks include memorable (and beautiful) arrangements of…

“I Can’t Get Started” (I. Gershwin/Duke)
“Love Won’t Let You Get Away” (Cahn/Van Heusen) — 2 versions!
“How About You” (Freed/Lane)

The orchestra supporting Crosby and Clooney is headed by Billy May (not to be confused with now-deceased TV pitchman Billy Mayes of OxyClean).

The liner notes alone are a selling point for this record. Written by Bing Crosby, you’ll learn his thoughts on the music within the album, as well as his thoughts on American society at the time. Even if he might’ve been expressing his thoughts with his tongue in cheek, it sounds like he truly didn’t have high opinions of young people at the time, nor their ability to read.

It’s likely these liner notes are unavailable nowadays unless you find the original LP version of Fancy Meeting You Here in a Dig ‘n’ Save somewhere. And that is too bad. Nevertheless, you can find this album on iTunes, if you so desire, and that means you can probably find the CD on sites like Amazon and half.com, too.

So what are you waiting for?  It’s time to cha-cha-cha… in Monterey!

White Christmas/A Christmas Special album cover

“White Christmas/A Christmas Special” – Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney

Fact: Christmas is not Christmas without Bing Crosby.

I got this hard-to-find LP from a friend and former WSUMer who discovered it at a resale shop either here in Madison or down in Chicago. Side A features Bing Crosby, and Clooney fans can flip to Side B.

If you’re not fortunate to own this record, it is available on iTunes under the new name “A Christmas Special.” Beware: The sound quality is not what you’d expect from iTunes — it appears the CD was dubbed straight from the LP itself.

Tracks to treasure:

1. “White Christmas” by Bing Crosby
Of course I’m going to recommend this! It’s the quintessential Christmas song sung by the voice of Christmas himself. It’s widely available everywhere, even if you can’t find this album easily.

4. “It Came Upon A Midnight Clear” by Rosemary Clooney
You’ll notice right away that Rosemary is notably older than her “Mambo Italiano” days in this recording, but she hasn’t lost her uncanny ability to hit each note right on its head. This arrangement is elegantly simple — other than a few interludes by a small woodwind section, it’s just Rosemary accompanied by solo piano.

7. “O Little Town of Bethlehem” by Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra
Ol’ Blue Eyes joins Bing for this single-versed rendition of O Little Town of Bethlehem. If you don’t like Frank, don’t worry – you can barely discern him from that other blue-eyed crooner.