Here’s a link to a feature on Billie Holiday that was posted by the CBC last week. It includes an interview that was conducted by Toronto radio host Dick MacDougall. The CBC gives it a 1951 dateline, but when I posted it on Facebook over the weekend, Toronto-based jazz historian Mark Miller wrote to say that it’s actually from 1952 and most likely coincided with Billie’s two-week engagement at the Colonial Tavern in August of that year.
MacDougall’s a bit intrusive for my tastes, but his appreciation for Lady Day seems to touch her deeply by the end of their 12-minute conversation. At the outset, Lady shaves a half-dozen years off her age in claiming that she was a 15-year-old when she recorded “Billie Blues” in 1936; she was 21. Throughout, she sounds lively and engaged as she recalls such models as Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith, peers like Mildred Bailey, Ella Fitzgerald, and Oscar Peterson, and a stormy bus ride with the Basie band between Albany and Manhattan. It’s great to hear her hearty laughter. And while the ravages of alcohol and drug abuse were taking their toll, there’s a glimmer of youth and a measure of Billie’s good-natured feistiness that comes through in this endearing interview. (By the way, it was Jimmy Mundy who wrote the arrangement for her hit recording of “Travelin’ Light” with Paul Whiteman in 1942.)On my FB post, the jazz singerJudy Wexler noted Billie’s pointed comments about the new sounds that were beginning to overwhelm jazz and pop at mid-century. What Lady alludes to specifically is the Les Paul-Mary Ford hit, “How High the Moon.” Those overdubbed electric guitars were obviously the harbinger of things to come that would not bode well for jazz, and Billie knew it. Hear her plea for material that “means something.”
The CBC post includes a couple of clips, the legendary “Fine and Mellow” that Lady performed on the Sound of Jazz in 1957, and this appearance with Armstrong in the 1947 movie,”New Orleans.”