Let’s hear it from the girls …
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Billie Holiday is often credited as being the first popular jazz singer to introduce the intense feeling of the blues to a mainstream audience.
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THIS week’s album reviews from The Courier-Mail (ratings out of five stars):
COMPILATION
Billie Holiday, The Centennial Collection
(Columbia/Legacy) *****
Such power, such grace, such beauty. This 20-track collection, issued on the 100th anniversary of Holiday’s birth, is a snapshot of a career that casts a long shadow across everything released since. Recordings of this quality only come along rarely.
And it was all recorded on the most rudimentary equipment, with none of the craft of the modern recording studio — or tricks, if you prefer — which can make average artists sound good and good artists sound like a genius.
Great is an overused word, but there is no doubt that’s what we are hearing with this: greatness. One woman at a microphone, her band locked in behind, singing with every ounce of clarity and emotion and humanity it is possible to muster. The opening track and her first hit, What a Little Moonlight Can Do, recorded almost 80 years ago when she was 20, sparkles as if recorded this morning.
Even without knowledge of any of the Holiday story, the music has a force of its own. Even singing a disposable slice of dancefloor jazz like Them There Eyes, Holiday imbues it with a depth and character that still speaks to us. When the material matches the quality of the voice, classics of the jazz songbook like These Foolish Things, Summertime and You Go to My Head, the results are dynamite.
The story is worth knowing too. Holiday is often credited as being the first popular jazz singer to introduce the intense feeling of the blues to a mainstream audience, breaking down the Tin Pan Alley tradition where singers rarely personalised the music. But she always made clear her debt to those who had gone before like Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong (“I always wanted Bessie’s big sound and Pops’ feeling.”)
It was the blues singers who sounded like they had lived what they were signing, and that’s what Holiday brought to jazz, breaking free of the chains of delivering the song as written.
“I don’t think I’m singing,” she once said. “I feel like I’m playing a horn. What comes out is what I feel.”
And what feeling, backed by some of the best musicians in New York, clarinetists Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw (see his solo on the Holiday-penned Billie’s Blues for a definition of what “swing” means), Buck Clayton on trumpet and Lester Young on tenor sax.
Nineteen of these songs were recorded in that golden six-year period of Holiday’s career before America entered World War II. Whether it was singing the blues on Why was I Born?, or cosying up to a lover through a bitter December on Irving Berlin’s I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm
, the results are timeless.
The optimism of the young woman with the world at her feet would soon fade.
She experienced the segregation of the American South while on tour and Columbia refused to release her version of Strange Fruit, a stark portrait of the lynching of African Americans.
After the recording of these tunes (and many others) in this period, Holiday’s career unravelled. She died in grim circumstances in hospital in 1959.
But joy, sorrow, desire, despair, the blues, all of life is here. Fashions change, the pop charts change. What Billie Holiday sang, that lives forever.
Noel Mengel
ROCK
Matthew E. White, Fresh Blood
(Domino) ****
Another high-grade outing from songwriter/producer White, who hails from Richmond, Virginia, and whose music was premiered on 2013’s excellent Inner Speaker. It’s a classic sound: strings, horns, piano and R & B flavours, and could easily be music made in the early ’70s somewhere between the soulful sounds of the American South and the explorations of West Coast singer-songwriters. White’s easy singing style sits gently in these dreamy sounds. But there is some deep emotion swirling within, such as the damaged relationship in Holy Moly, which refers to domestic abuse, and the farewell to a star on Tranquility. Opener Take Care My Baby is lavishly orchestrated without going over the top; Rock and Roll is Cold rolls on a gospel-type piano with female backing vocals and baritone saxes. Circle ‘Round The Sun is a gospel tune straight-up, stripping it back to piano, drums and vocals as White whispers: “Put your arms around me Jesus tonight.” But you don’t need to be a believer to feel the healing power of White’s music.
Noel Mengel
WORLD
Mzaza, Ghosts
(MGM) ****
Brisbane-based Mzaza sing in French and English but their music is as exotic as their family backgrounds, pulsing with Balkan and other Eastern rhythms. They say there’s “fire in my blood’’ in one of their tunes and that’s in the music too. Vocalist Pauline Maudy is of French and Jewish Sephardic descent, a people who escaped the Spanish Inquisition via Morocco. Enfant Du Chemin (Children of the Road), winner of best world music song at last month’s Queensland Music Awards, is derived from traditional Macedonian roots, opening with Maudy’s Gallic vocals and featuring a mix of violin and accordion. The stories are timeless: in Sous La Lune, village women wonder if their men will return from the sea; in Nighwatch a “sans-papier’’ couple hide from police;
Love On TV compares real love with the fiction kind. There is a cover of Serge Gainsbourg’s Dying to Dance With The Devil too, but the originals are its equal. Ghosts? There are plenty here in a world where the past is ever-present and music knows no borders.
Noel Mengel
REISSUE
Julie Andrews & Cast, The Sound of Music
(Sony) ***1/2
Significant anniversaries occur this year. Queensland Youth Orchestra shares its 50th anniversary with The Sound of Music. French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (once called a heretic) died 70 years ago on April 10, 1955. Having served as a stretcher-bearer at the front in World War I and survived the second exiled in China, he would have related to the scenario of the much-loved musical tale of love and wartime survival, with Maria sung by the stellar Julie Andrews. The Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein duo never achieved such acclaim as it did for this score. From first track to finale as nuns and Nazi officers combine (how ironic) in Escape and Climb Every Mountain, this anniversary reissue will please many of the musical’s devotees. Its irrepressible joie de vivre is captured with clarity and crisp sound reproduction as voices soar in Morning Hymn, frolic through My Favorite Things and catch the uncomplicated beauty of Edelweiss to deliver a musical mosaic of human emotions and sentiments in every note.
Patricia Kelly
POP
Say Lou Lou, Lucid Dreaming
(Cosmos) ***
Twins have a special kind of connection. It’s interesting that so few choose to work together in the field of music, but Miranda and Elektra Kilbey, daughters of The Church’s Steve, make a full-length album debut after creating quite a buzz with early singles. It’s nothing like The Church, with a gleaming electro-pop finish applied to everything here. Opener Everything We Touch sums up the sound, with elegantly sculpted synths and beats as the two — they often seem to sing as one — weave their breathy vocals through. Glitter is a winning euro-disco tune (with a hint of Bowie in the wobbly synth), while the ’80s-flavoured Games For Girls is all bubbling arpeggiated synthesisers and ever-rising bass lines, an effect that works best under the mirror ball rather than in the headphones. Julian is the standout track, a dreamy song with some mystery in the lyrics, with the twins’ vocals shown to best effect. But the cool production sheen gets too predictable, and Lucid Dreaming feels more like a collection of singles and B-sides than an album for listening start to finish.
Noel Mengel
ROCK
Calexico, Edge of the Sun
(Spunk) ***1/2
Calexico is a Californian town on the border with Mexico which has an annual mariachi festival. Originally a duo featuring Joey Burns and John Convertino, who had played in Tuscon, Arizona, band Giant Sand, Calexico the band certainly reflect the border country environment. They make a brand of country-rock country music with a dusty atmosphere enhanced by the use of brass, sometimes with a mariachi flavour. But more often the brass creates textures on songs like Bullets & Rocks, an anthemic tune laced with trumpets and the kind of harmony singing that David Crosby might provide for Stephen Stills. There is a plaintive, driving-through-the-desert loneliness on
Tapping On The Line and the Dylanesque When The Angels Played, but they season this with spicey dance tunes like Cumbia de Donde, which shows the distance between Calexico mariachi and Havana mambo isn’t as far as you might think. They do a nice line in instrumentals too, and songs of the quality of Woodshed Waltz make for one of the most satisfying outings of the band’s nine-album career.
Noel Mengel
COMPILATION
Carole King, A Beautiful Collection
(Sony) ***
King was one of the great pop writers of the ’60s, when she dominated the charts as a writer of hits for others, and the ’70s, when her easy-on-the-ear solo career made her one of the biggest selling singer-songwriters. She’s now the subject of a musical and this 15-track collection (17 songs if you count the three-song in-concert medley of ’60s hits with James Taylor) collects King’s performances of the songs which feature in the musical. It concentrates on her early ’70s years and albums like Tapestry and Music, which also included her own versions of mega ’60s hits Will You Love Me Tomorrow and (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman. So you get I Feel the Earth Move, Sweet Seasons, Jazzman, You’ve Got A Friend, etc, one more time, but nothing from her overlooked but excellent 1970 solo debut Writer, for example. The big hits are here but without much more of the musical context and not even a few paragraphs in the liner-notes to give some details for those just discovering her music now. The 2011 compilation The Best of is a much more comprehensive career overview.
Noel Mengel
