The Proof Is In The Jam - Part 3: The Ways of "I'm Free"

June 8, 1953 - Detroit, Michigan, The Graystone Ballroom, The Battle of the Bands - Duke Ellington & his Orchestra vs. Stan Kenton & his Orchestra.

On the date shown above, I was a twelve year-old standing in front of Mr. Ellington's great orchestra. Only this year did I pin down the date. But I carried the image of Duke Ellington and me until now.

In 1957 I heard Sarah Vaughan and Billy Eckstine ('B') sing duets with Count Basie's band. 'B' also soloed on valve trombone. Bud Powell was also on this Birdland All-Stars on Tour program. And over the course of the next few years I would have read André Hodeir's Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence, subscribed to The Jazz Review and Downbeat, read the latter's accounts of Billie Holiday's and Art Pepper's arrests, and wore out my vinyl LP of Lady Day's Music For Torching.

Jam Session Aesthetic

Bob Crosby - "I'm Free" (Bob Haggart's original composition)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBYyQQ8YoqI
Lady's Way
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07r-2zg0k24
'B''s Way
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCVLUct6C_k
Linda's Way
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdH5hrJKjlE

"I'm Free" or "What's New?"
Jerrold Levinson "Jazz Vocal Interpretation: A Philosophical Analysis", Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2013, pps. 35-43.
Question: Could Billie Holiday have sung "What's New?" in a Levinsonian straight-way (Linda's Way) in addition to a Levinsonian jazz-way (Lady's/'B''s Way)?
Could " 'Round Midnight" be sung in Linda's Way?

Levinson's straight/jazz contrast in my view doesn't have any useful conceptual work to do when applied to The Great American Songbook, to (once) Popular Songs. According to Gunther Schuller, Phil Schaap and others, singers - both classical- and jazz-singers - were not often thought of by musicians and critics as being musicians; they were just boy- or girl-singers. Schuller in The Swing Era, page 527, writes, "The quip that singers have resonance where their brains ought to be is a stock joke among musicians all over the world." The "Great Soloists" section of The Swing Era includes only one 'singer', the musician Billie Holiday - the remaining twelve great soloists are male instrumentalists. Both musics of Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong, great musician-soloist-singers, were treated in Schuller's Early Jazz. Schuller's Great Soloists are Coleman Hawkins, Roy Eldridge, Bunny Berigan, Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, Red Norvo, Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Charlie Christian, Ben Webster, Jack Teagarden, Pee Wee Russell, and Henry "Red" Allen. Billie Holiday performed with, and recorded with, nearly of these musicians. They considered her to be one of them, a great jazz-soloist-musician.
  Her early recordings with Teddy Wilson and with Lester Young were in the Jam Session Tradition or what Phil Schaap calls the Swing Song Tradition - listen to Schaap's 2010 program devoted to Billie Holiday at Phil Schaap Jazz http://philschaapjazz.com/index.php?l=page_view&p=radio. In this tradition she was a soloist among soloists, in most cases a great soloist among great soloists. "I Cried For You" consists of a Johnny Hodges chorus, Billie Holiday Chorus, Teddy Wilson Chorus, Harry Carney chorus, ensemble takes the tune out - jam session feel. It is the jam session feel that predominates Billie Holiday's great early recordings and (in my view) her late, great Verve recordings, her Music For Torching, her "What's New" above. See Schuller's exposition of Billie's "I Cried For You" on pages 533-34. According to Schuller,

Of the several unique qualities Billie [Holiday] brought to jazz-singing - in some instances for the first time ... - none is more important than her ability to reshape (re-compose) [emphasis added] a given song to make it wholly her own. She did this on two levels - almost always simultaneously: on the larger structural level by freely reinventing both the melody and its rhythms, on the smaller level by embellishing these with her own vocal adornments. [pps. 532-33]

Like so many (most, I would say) popular songs, "What's New" has jazz, jazz-swing built into it. A singer may develop a way of 'interpreting' a song, develop a way of feeling a song in various ways - ways that Levinson treats in great detail in his paper (I counted twenty or so). But a jazz-singer's performance of a song - Billie Holiday's "I Cried For You" - need not be an interpretation of a song's embodiment in sheet music. I read somewhere that Teddy Wilson and his musicians who were recording with Billie Holiday were using lead sheets which contained the bare essentials of the music. The lead sheets resulted in improvisation and ensemble-playing by the soloists and rhythm section. Whatever 'interpretation' there was on Miss Holiday's part was certainly not part of the performance-mix that included all of the musicians in the recording session. There was no sheet music in the jam in other words, just creative musicians creating new music, new sounds, new ensemble textures.
  Miss Holiday was not an interpreter of songs; she was a re-creator, a re-composer, of songs, the results of which were among the highest forms of improvised vocal artistry. Her performances were not then interpretations of songs. She was a jazz soloist who was respected by respected jazz-instrumentalists.