Billie Holiday’s Emotional Life, and Words

We often hear of Billie Holiday’s ability to convey emotion and her freedom in how she places and paints the words of a song. Past that, there is a sense that what she is doing is ineffable: beyond words. 

In his truly loquacious “The Swing Era,” Gunther Schuller says that what she does is “in the deepest sense inexplicable.” (529.) I’m not sure if the root word “to explain” is one I would choose. Whose art, if it’s worth speaking of, is in fact wholly “explicable"? And which, especially, “in the deepest sense?” To hear of “explaining” something that rich and varied feels suspiciously like an urge to fit it into a preset method or scheme, to control it.

Still, I can’t accept there are no words at all for the ways Holiday, or others of her caliber, achieves such compelling emotional effects.

Billie Holiday’s manner of interpretation comes from fully inhabiting jazz as improvised music. She interrogates her own feelings about the song in the moment, at nearly every moment, for almost every word, in every performance. She uses an ample range of nuances of timbre, pitch, and timing to create a “solo,” like a horn player’s. The effect is to mirror how emotions work, in their subtlety. The musical surface of Holiday’s delivery of the words mirrors the dynamics of emotional life itself.

Holiday, then, does more than just convey raw emotions like happiness or sadness, though they are there. She is certainly not just pressing musical “buttons” to elicit them. It’s not that simple. Subtlety and nuance in her phrasing convey more complex feelings and experiences of them. Listen to her remarkable performance of “My Man.” Around the song’s eulogy for the lover who beats and who cheats, she manages to convey regret, remorse, but also passion, defiance, delirium, and transcendence. There are “mixed feelings” after all: recalled, distanced, qualified, however intense they may be as raw experience.

We have the sense that she has lived and triumphed, or at least survived, ennobling those things. That is the basis for our identification with her and feeling that she represents us. A simple transmission of basic emotions we already experience every day would not have that artistic effect.

There is craft in this, and craft can be approached with words (even “explaining” that that craft is inferior to its practice: it ultimately has to be internalized in the mind and body of the performer). Like the great jazz instrumentalists, and many singers and players outside of that which is called jazz, she has uncanny timing. She’s free, but also rooted.

Free, that is, to linger on one note, and stop another short, as speech does. To push and pull, stretch and sculpt each word or phrase like the clay a sculptor lovingly treats. That is a singer’s particular musical vocation: to modulate timbre as speech does in syllables. Try this: say the word “yes” very slowly and you will hear a wide scope of timbres our tongues and lips can shape in order to communicate. Then say “yes” that slowly to a lover and you will know how music or sound has the possibility to re-create or re-enact emotional life.

Added to her mastery of tone and timbre, Holiday is also firmly rooted in the beat or groove set by her fellow musicians. For all her rubato phrasing, she hits many notes squarely on the beat. That is her “secret.” She places certain words, or their onset, on the quarter or eighth note, in sync with group’s overall pulse, which anchors other syllables or tropes that delay or anticipate wildly. She uses accents, and that is essential to swing. I have confirmed this approach to the secrets of Holiday’s rhythmic feeling in discussion with Catherine Russell, who should know. (See also John Szwed’s thorough and essential treatment of Holiday’s singing style, both from an interpretive and technical point of view, in “Billie Holiday: the Musician and the Myth,” especially chapters six and seven.)

Another freedom Holiday famously allows herself is the liberty she takes with written melodies, which is a form of improvisation like any other. She stays fairly close to the melody, and does not scat (create a solo out of non-verbal syllables) nor leave the meter altogether. What she accomplishes is a tasteful rethinking of original melody, rather than a radically different layer on top of the song structure or chords. Her ad lib on the written song generally winds up to be one that could qualify for a publishable song itself. An example is the nearly perfect performance of Night and Day, a masterful song she somehow comments on and does justice to at the same time.

I am not saying anyone should borrow what Holiday feels about a song. They should be asking how they themselves feel about it, at all times.