_Billie Holiday -- The Musician and the Myth_ -- John Szwed
This has a lot of valuable information, and it shows how intelligent Holiday was, as well as how brilliant she was as a musician, despite not being able to read music. (!)
Szwed is the former director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia U., according to the little bio on the dust jacket in the back of the book.
So, can I manage to convey my brief excitement and then disappointment upon finding
a page of actual notation, and a few pages of actual meat -- where Szwed talks about Holiday singing "behind the beat"?
Actual discussion of musical substance, with accompanying notation, is almost extinct in mainstream publications. Analysis is extremely rare.
Good analysis* is almost non-existent. Sadly it doesn't exist, here.
It's on pages 118 and 119, with
What is This Thing Called Love as the object lesson. (YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhu7x94kbzk )
The discussion is a complete shambles. This is too bad, because Szwed has done the work of finding an example and notating it -- though I'm not sure the notation is strictly accurate.
It's a shambles because it makes what Holiday is doing sound conceptually complicated. It's not. Virtuosic, yes, but complicated, no. It's simple enough to understand, and pretty damn hard to do, unless you have the knack.
She's displacing notes rhythmically so they fall in different slots -- basically a form of well-understood syncopation.
And, she's singing a little bit -- a tiny, tiny,
tiny bit -- "behind" the beat, or after the beat, so the rhythm section is sort of pulling her along; or there's a kind of tension or propulsion generated. It's not sloppy. She knows
exactly where the beat is, and where she wants to put the melody in relation to it. It's sublime, actually.
Good jazz players have their signature style of timing. It's sometimes called, simply,
swing. Or
feel.
All this is well-understood (otherwise musicians wouldn't be able to play with each other), and Szwed would probably agree with the above.
Then why the pretentious and nonsensical discussion involving "dual-track time", or whether this is properly called rubato, or the influence of West African Music? None of these things have anything to do with it.
It's simple to understand: Displacement/syncopation and very subtle behind-the-beat placement. Frank Sinatra did it too, not to take anything away from Holiday.
There are a few possible explanations:
1) He's used to talking in a vacuum to people who don't understand what he's talking about, so no one has challenged the substance of what he has to say, so he confabulates.
2) The section got edited down into some kind of incoherence or the editor suggested making it "more interesting".
3)
He's the one trying to make it sound more complicated than it is, with a little dash of multicultural reference to make it seem more...whatever.
4) Musicology favors pretentiousness, perhaps. Sad, but probably true. Musicologists are rarely the best musicians, anyway.
What Holiday was doing wasn't mysterious, wasn't "dual-track time", it was just
masterful.
Heh. Here's some P.C: Trombonist George Lewis objecting to any use of the word "master", in his lecture at New England Conservatory many years ago.
Ok, George: Holiday wasn't "masterful." She was supremely
skillful.
Oh, jeez. Probably can't say "supremely."
So, the book is still the sum of its fascinating anecdotes, even if it has no conceptual light. That's something.
* The last book I can recall that had decent analysis and insights is Charles Rosen's _The Classical Style_. That was published a long time ago.
