Look out! He's got a knife!

My relationship counsellor is Billie Holiday

Here's a link for y'all: www.ladyday.net

It's an unofficial Billie Holday website. And if you check out this specifically, you can download a ten minute short film called Symphony In Black with Duke Ellington and Billie. She's not much of an actor, but it's a thrill to see her perform.

If you get a chance, you should read her autobiography, Lady Sing the Blues. The easiest to find is the tragic edition with Diana Ross on the cover, from the movie she starred in as Billie. The book is an "as told to such & such" and it reads as if it's her speaking voice. It came out the year before she died, right around the same time as the album Lady in Satin, where Billie sounded so much older than her 43 years, her voice cracked and rusted but more powerful than ever.

I've been told to blog more, and this is the best I can come up with right now. Been listening to A Love Supreme by John Coltrane a lot, still haven't got my head around it yet. I think I'll put it on right now.

Yeah that's better.

It's supposed to be Coltrane 's most spiritual album, intended as a gift for God. Coltrane was apparently a universalist; he said not long before his death "I believe in all religions." So which God he meant when he said in the liner notes "All praise to God" again and again, I'm unsure. But I believe it, man.

There's a bit towards the end of Acknowledgement when Trane takes the sax away from his lips and briefly chants into the microphone, "A love supreme, a love supreme," gentle but intense. The bass line throughout kind of chants the whole thing.

I'm not religious at all - doesn't make sense to me, sorry - but there's something going on here. As the Pixies had it, "There's something about this song, this is a song about something there."

Right now Trane's tenor sax is ascending in the chant line, and now he's chanting it himself, sounds to me like he was chanting while he was blowing. I know next to nothing about jazz, but this is amazing. This and Kind of Blue by Miles Davis and Lady of Satin by Lady Day belong in every record collection, man.

Jazz seems to me to be a form of just about the purest expression. I sometimes try to express myself through words, but words nail down meaning a bit too hard sometimes. Music seems to me to be as powerful a way of communicating feeling and experience as any there is - perhaps even more so than painting - and a great musician who can flow on the fly, like Trane or Monk or like Billie remaking a slapper of an oldie into her own image so that it surpasses the literal meaning of the tin-pan words and gets right to the heart of the matter - to the diaphragm really, that always seems to be where you feel it as much as sing from it -

Well there's nothing like it. I've never seen a truly great musician improvising live, I've only come across it second-hand in recordings. Imagine being there when Hendrix unleashed. I've listened to one particular live recording of Jimi live at Winterland a thousand times, sometimes when severely altered, and every time it's blown my mind in some fashion, the feeling that these aren't just notes and squalls of feedback they're a communication of experience, but how much more intense would it have been to be physically present when he was taking us through that? Guess I'll never know.

Okay ENOUGH.

Posted by pearce at January 14, 2004 8:59 PM