On Fine and Mellow and Falling Hard for Jazz

James Marcus @ House of Mirth linked to this famous & infamous, mind-blowing, breathtaking & tear-jerking video of Billie Holiday performing “Fine and Mellow” on a live CBS television special dedicated to the giants of jazz. This was in December 1957. This was just 18 months or so before she died. This was years after she stopped speaking to Lester Young—she gave him his nickname, the Prez, and he gave her hers, Lady Day, although some stories have him bestowing the moniker on her mother first—but then they were thrown together unexpectedly for this performance, and when it’s his turn to solo, after the incomparable Coleman Hawkins, he steps up quickly—he was ill then, too, and rarely stood to play anymore—and blows a music that actually seems to float, so fine & mellow it seems to perfectly embody everything about the song (especially in contrast to the jittery, high-flying trumpets to come), a style picked up (he said) from C-melody saxman Frankie “Tram” Trumbauer, Bix Beiderbecke’s musical partner, these two Midwestern ofays together inventing cool jazz, Lester Young’s (and Chet Baker’s and Miles Davis’ and Bill Evans’) musical godfathers. (And here’s a 1949 photograph of Billie by another Midwestern white boy, an Iowan as it turns out, Carl Van Vechten.) So there he is, Lester Young blowing this gorgeous, improvised solo break, and the camera follows Billie’s bobbing & approving head, a lifetime of gigs & drugs & fights & love & appreciation in that look she gives him, and for a moment jazz takes over, it overcomes everything: her impending death, his impending death, everything. And I know I’m projecting and romanticizing, and I know that as performances go, it’s not even that good really, but the first time I saw this video—seven years ago?—I cried and I fell hard in love with jazz.

It doesn’t have to be jazz or Lady Day or Prez, it doesn’t even have to be music, but something has to move you like this or you’re not living.

• Here’s an NPR story about the performance [scroll down].

• And here’s another video, moving but in different ways, of another great singer, Nina Simone.

Comments

[James Marcus]

Hi Brendan,

Breathtaking, mindblowing, and yes, tearjerking (in the positive sense of the word, if you know what I mean)--I agree with all of it. One little error, though. Unless my memory is way off, Lester Young plays his chorus on the heels of Ben Webster. Hawkins plays later in the clip, right before Roy Eldridge does his shooting-for-the-moon-and-stars thing.

All best,
James

[Brendan Wolfe]

Thanks for the correction, James. Much appreciated.