Billie Holiday - Lady in Satin (1958)

Undoubtedly one of the most important jazz musicians of all time, Billie Holiday changed the face of vocal music forever with her emphasis on expressivity over technique; alternating phrasing and stress on ordinarily unstressed syllables and words over singing the song straight.  Her contributions to music can be traced back to some of her earliest recordings of 1933, and seen in her final recordings from 1959.  However, taking a chronological listen through her two-and-a-half decades-worth of music will quickly reveal that Billie's voice changed drastically in quality and tone.  Listening to her earlier work reveal Holiday in good voice - jovial, light-hearted, teeming with energy.  Jump ahead twenty years and you'll hear a voice twenty years older than her age.  By her early forties, Billie's voice revealed the signs of abuse - a sharper, pinched tone, slight rasp in the upper and lower extremities of her now-diminished range, and, even in her upbeat numbers, a greater sense of sorrow.  While not inherently a blues singer, and though not necessarily a tragic figure, Billie's life was filled with the kind of heartache and disappointment many blues singers often convey in their music.

Recorded about a year-and-a-half before her death at the tender age of 44, Lady in Satin reveals Holiday at her worst state, both vocally and physically.  At the time of this recording, Holiday is 42 and in poor health from years of drug and alcohol abuse, as well as physical abuse from a string of abusive men (notably Louis McKay, falsely portrayed as a hero in the fictitious 'biopic', Lady Sings the Blues).  Holiday's voice is tired, lacking the brightness and energy she once possessed.  Apart from her technical shortcomings, however, Holiday's voice reveals something so tragically beautiful in regards to her emotive capabilities.  Whatever Holiday lacked in vocal power she was more than able to make up for in expressivity and interpretive prowess.  To fully understand the circumstances surrounding Holiday's health during these recording sessions, however, it is important to understand her life and the circumstances leading up to this controversial recording.

Born in Baltimore in 1915, Eleanora Fagan grew up in a dysfunctional family.  Having been less-than-present after his daughter's birth, Clarence Holiday, Eleanora's father, traveled the country with Fletcher Henderson's Orchestra as a guitarist.  Despite loving her daughter, Sadie Harris (Fagan by some accounts), Eleanora's mother, was forced to leave her daughter in the care of other relatives sporadically through Eleanora's childhood while she traveled up North to provide for her daughter.  At only ten, Holiday was raped by a neighbor and eventually sent to a private Catholic institution for girls.  It was there, according to Holiday, that she was once locked in a room all night next to a dead girl as punishment for misbehaving.  Eventually, Holiday moved up to New York where, because of naivety on her mother's part, took a job as a call girl to help make rent.  She was, at one point, arrested and briefly jailed for prostitution.  It wasn't until 1933, at the age of seventeen, that she was discovered by noted record producer, John Hammond, affording her the opportunity to leave the "good-times house" to pursue a career in singing.  She soon adopted the name 'Billie Holiday' (she took Billie from actress Billie Dove, and Holiday from her father's surname).  Throughout the thirties, Holiday toured the States (heavily in the South) with famed jazz musicians like Count Basie, Benny Goodman, and Artie Shaw.  While these tours were often physically grueling - nights spent traveling on crowded buses, often facing sleepless nights - the humiliating racist indignities faced by Holiday and her crew proved to be the real test of endurance.  By the end of the decade, Holiday was through with the rough life of traveling with dance bands, only to be humiliated with bigotry and endangered by threats of violence all over the country.  In 1939, she landed a gig at the Village's Café Society, where she first performed the lyrically-gruesome "Strange Fruit" - a plaintive, gloomy ballad about black lynchings in the South.  A studio recording eventually followed, shooting her to almost immediate stardom.

Throughout the 1940's, Holiday's career spiraled upward, spurring hits such as "Trav'lin' Light," "Lover Man," "I'll Be Seeing You," and "Crazy He Calls Me."  Two of her biggest hits, "Don't Explain" and "God Bless the Child" - both of which she co-wrote - were also recorded at the height of her career.  Holiday no longer had to travel dirty buses, as she was now becoming more and more acclaimed and respected within 'mainstream' (white) audiences, which afforded her the opportunity to play prestigious venues.  In 1947, she appeared in her first (and only) major motion picture, New Orleans, alongside Louis Armstrong.  She was even given the nickname "Lady Day" by fellow musician and friend, Lester Young.

However, as Holiday's professional life was taking off, an unhealthy marriage to Sonny Monroe led to her first taste with heroin in the early 1940's.  According to Holiday, Monroe made her feel like if she really loved him, she would indulge in drugs.  Aside from being a drug pusher, Monroe was blatantly unfaithful during their short but tumultuous marriage (one particular incident in which Billie caught lipstick on his collar prompted her composition, "Don't Explain").  While their marriage ended by the mid-1940's, her heroin addiction continued.  In 1947, she was arrested for drug possession and sentenced to one year in prison (according to Holiday, however, the stash with which she was caught did not belong to her).  Adding insult to injury, her cabaret card was permanently revoked, disabling her from performing any place in New York that served liquor for the rest of her life.  Nonetheless, Holiday scored a prestigious and highly-anticipated gig at Carnegie Hall in 1948.  Despite her previous setbacks, the concert was sold-out in advance - with additional seats added - and a tremendous success.

Despite her newly-heightened career, as well as numerous attempts to get clean, Holiday's addictions to heroin - and eventually alcohol - slowly unraveled.  By the mid-1950's, her voice and physical appearance were beginning to show the effects addiction had been taking on her.  Shortly after a highly-successful European tour, Holiday was, once again, arrested for drug possession (although no prison time was served).  Years of racial indignities, being targeted by the law, and the inability to seek proper treatment without being arrested and labeled a criminal instilled in her deep bitterness and resentment, filling her music with jaded cynicism that would help blur the definition of her music as either jazz or blues.  Her addictions raged on, and, despite touring and recording acclaimed albums throughout the fifties, her body took a beating from years of mistreatment.  By 1959, Holiday was suffering from heart disease and cirrhosis of the liver, affecting her breathing, posture, and ability to walk.  By May, she had lost a considerable amount of weight and was admitted to the hospital.  On July 17, 1959, after having been humiliated one final time by being arrested on her death bed for possession, Billie body's gave up and she passed away at the age of 44.  In her last year, however, she would record one of the most acclaimed and disputed works of jazz of all time.

February, 1958.  Holiday begins recording sessions with noted arranger Ray Ellis for a new project called Lady in Satin.  Holiday had previously heard Ellis' Ellis in Wonderland and decided she had to have him work on her next album.  While DJ's around the country were busy calling Lady Day "Lady Yesterday," Holiday was busy creating one of jazz's greatest albums ever recorded.  Unlike any of her previous albums, Holiday chose songs that she had never previously sung.  Picking the songs based on the lyrics, the content which she recorded is essentially Billie's autobiography - perhaps speaking closer and more personally from the soul than her 1956 autobiography.  She also chose to forgo the traditional instrumental setting usually reserved for jazz.  As opposed to having a jazz combo accompany her, Billie chose to use a full orchestra (in the style of Frank Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald).  The addition of jazz harmony and jazz solos provides for beautiful discord and dissonant tension, highlighting the tension between the sweetness of Ellis' arrangements and Holiday's ravaged voice.  While listeners were already familiar with Holiday's roughened tone and pinched range, Lady in Satin alarmed listeners with the further decay in Holiday's voice.  Nonetheless, Holiday was once again breaking ground with her unapologetic delivery, singing what she wanted - and she chose difficult material for this album - against the sweetness of an orchestra, despite the fact that her style and sound did not normally lend itself to the smoother sounds of Ellis or Sinatra.  The unorthodox juxtaposition of Billie's mangled, coarse voice against Ellis' sweetly somber arrangements is not easy to listen to.  One listen and it is easy to tell that Holiday is struggling to hold up through some of the more difficult numbers.  However, all the listener needs to do is listen to and feel the emotive, plaintive cry of Holiday's lamenting soul, as well as Ellis' melancholy, heart-wrenching arrangements, to understand the magnificence of Holiday's penultimate album.  While many critics bemoan about the "squareness" of Ellis' arrangements, or the "deplorable" state of Holiday and her voice, they are not listening with full musical ears to the emotional significance of this body of work.

While the whole album stands as a masterpiece, every track shining on its own, there are a couple of tracks that stand out not only as strong album tracks, but as possibly two of the strongest tracks Billie ever recorded.  Those tracks are the powerful, dirge-like "I'm a Fool to Want You," in which you can all but feel Holiday's heart break as she sings a lyric so painfully close to her own life, and the stunning, self-reflective "You've Changed" - vocally the best track on the album.

"I'm a Fool to Want You" - Billie's stark, gravely introductory lines opens the album.  Totally unaccompanied, the first few words, "I'm a fool..." linger like a ghostly spirit haunting the world it longs to leave, grabbing onto the listener's soul, pulling one into the sadness and sorrow that filled the latter years of Billie's life.  Ellis' instrumental intro and conclusion, particularly the theme played by the cello, underscore Billie's gloom and further the overwhelming sense of death that lingers not too far behind.

"I'm a fool to want you/pity me, I need you/I know it's wrong, it must be wrong/but right or wrong, I can't get along without you..."

"You've Changed" - While Billie is in weak voice throughout the album, "You've Changed" nonetheless fits her voice like a glove, allowing what remains of her range to bloom and blossom.  During the final refrain (quoted below), Holiday briefly emerges of the depths of the hell into which she is sinking to achieve one last triumphant moment of glory, much like a swan song, to admit defeat and bow out graciously.

 "You've changed/you're not the angel I once knew/no need to tell me that we're through/it's all over now, you've changed...you've changed."

It is clear that these songs are autobiographical in a much greater sense than that is reflects her tumultuous love life.  It seems Billie connects to these lyrics more deeply than any others because she seems to be singing of times lost.  It is merely not losing love that she is singing about.  The lyrics also reflect a sense of knowing that she herself is not too far from death.  While Billie was not inherently a blues singer, this album defines the meaning of the blues as Billie strips down for us and allows the listener a voyeuristic journey through the pain and sorrow deep-rooted in her heart. ~

"I would say that the most emotional moment was her listening to the playback of 'I'm a Fool to Want You'. There were tears in her eyes...After we finished the album I went into the control room and listened to all the takes. I must admit I was unhappy with her performance, but I was just listening musically instead of emotionally. It wasn't until I heard the final mix a few weeks later that I realized how great her performance really was." - Arranger Ray Ellis