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Billie Holiday & Lester Young -- Lady Day and Pres -- 1937 / 1941 -- Fremeaux & Associés -- Bit 320 -- Part 2

Part 2 :

I Can't Get Started

I'm Pulling Through

I Can't Believe That You're in Love With Me

Let's Do It (Let's Fall in Love)

Say It With a Kiss

This Year's Kisses

Sun Showers

Time on My Hands

Sailboat in the Moonlight

Yours and Mine

Very Thought of You

All of Me [Take 3]

Me, Myself and I

I'll Never Be the Same

Without Your Love

Trav'lin All Alone

Mean to Me

You're Just a No Account

Notes : This week, Riverwalk Jazz tells the story of the musical collaboration and personal friendship of singer Billie Holiday and saxophonist Lester Young. In the 1930s, these two titans of jazz together recorded many memorable sides such as "He's Funny That Way," "Travlin' All Alone," and "Easy Livin.'" Sixteen of these recordings have recently been reissued on a Sony CD, A Musical Romance.

There was a special magic when Billie and Lester got together to make music. They had an amazing intuitive rapport. Listening to their records, you can tell how much they inspired each other musically.

Billie Holiday was an American original. For her, singing was a way to survive. Born poor and black in Baltimore around 1915, she grew up in Harlem, supported by her mother who worked as a maid. Billie said, "The Depression was nothing new to us, we always had it."

Billie was a skinny 15-year-old kid when she went down to a local dive in Harlem to audition for a job as a dancer. Told she wasn't "pretty enough," she tried singing instead and was surprised to find out they liked it.

Scratching out a living singing in Harlem clubs in the early '30s, Billie was "discovered" by the well-connected talent scout and record producer, John Hammond. She went on to wide acclaim as one of America's great vocal interpreters of jazz and blues songs.

Tenor saxophonist Lester Young came from a musical New Orleans family. As a ten-year-old boy, Lester was the drummer in his father's carnival band, traveling through the Midwest playing tent shows. He ran away from home at the age of 18.

Early in his career, Lester was urged to play down his own unique musical style. While he was with Fletcher Henderson's Orchestra, he was forced to listen to Coleman Hawkins' records over and over again in a vain attempt to get him to imitate Hawk's style. But when Lester joined Count Basie at the Reno Room in Kansas City in 1934, his own style had a chance to blossom.

Billie and Lester met at a Harlem jam session in the early '30s and worked together on the Count Basie band and in nightclubs on New York's 52nd St. At one point Lester moved into the apartment Billie shared with her mother, Sadie Fagan. The story goes that Lester was a great fan of Sadie's home cooking and tired of living in rat-infested New York hotel rooms. In any event, he was part of the family. It was a pleasant change to have a gentleman around the house, and Lester was always a gentleman.

Billie insisted their relationship was strictly platonic. She gave him the nickname "Prez" after President Franklin Roosevelt, who she thought was the "greatest man around." Lester in turn gave Billie her famous nickname, "Lady Day."

When Billie was asked to explain her style of singing, she said, "I don't think I'm singing. I feel like I'm playing a horn. I try to improvise like Les Young, like Louis Armstrong or someone else I admire. What comes out is what I feel. I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That's all I know."

About Lester Young, Billie said, "For my money Lester was the world's greatest. I loved his music; my favorite recordings are the ones I made with Lester. Lester sings with his horn. You listen to him and you can almost hear the words."

Lester Young and Billie Holiday were both unusually sensitive people, easily hurt by the hard knocks of the music business and the racism that was a way of life in America in the 1930s. To ease the pain, they both found solace in drugs and liquor.

Lady Day once talked about her life on the road with Artie Shaw: "Most of the cats in the band were wonderful to me, but I got tired of scenes in crummy roadside restaurants over getting served. Some places wouldn't even let me eat in the kitchen. I got tired of having a Federal case over breakfast, lunch and dinner. You had to smile to keep from throwing up. As they say, 'There's no business like show business.'"

Lester Young died on March 15, 1959 at the age of 49. Billie Holiday followed him a few months later in July. She was even younger, only 44. These two old friends ended their lives as tragic figures, their genius worn away by heavy drinking and drugs.

Through their recorded legacy, Prez and Lady Day will continue to entertain audiences and influence the course of jazz music through the twenty-first century and beyond

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