Crash Course Timeline, No. 44: Billie Holiday, Triumph and Tragedy

This one feels right.

“Her bluesy vocal style brought a slow and rough quality to the jazz standards that were often upbeat and light. This combination made for poignant and distinctive renditions of songs that were already standards. By slowing the tone with emotive vocals that reset the timing and rhythm, she added a new dimension to jazz singing.”
- PBS.org, American Masters Series (June 2006)

If your first experience of a piece of music or a particular performer happens decades after they impacted music, the fuss doesn’t always translate. Billie Holiday broke molds, minds and ran headlong into barriers her entire life. It’s a minor miracle she made it to adulthood, never mind an iconic place in pop culture. Because most of the fuss happened before the internet, I expect I’ll struggle to do her justice, but this feels like a good place to start.

“If I'm going to sing like someone else, then I don't need to sing at all.”
- Billie Holiday (Biography, 7 Things You May Not Know About Billie Holiday)

While minor questions exist, most sources agree Holiday was born to two unwed teenagers in Philadelphia on April 7, 1915. She spent more of her childhood with her mother, Sarah Julia “Sadie” Fagan – her father, Clarence Halliday, left to pursue a career in music was she was very young - but, even given those circumstances, her home life veered between unstable and outright dangerous, as well as various cities (mostly Baltimore). Sources also generally agree spent her tween-to-teen years in a reform school (sometimes for her own protection) and doing chores and running errands at a brothel (and even getting arrested for prostitution, though that could be a wrong place, wrong time thing). The Biography piece claims she worked for a chance to listen to the madam’s Victrola instead of getting paid. Holiday recalled Bessie Smith’s “West End Blues” as a favorite, but she loved Louis Armstrong too.

After moving to Harlem to live with her mother again, Holiday, then 17, found work as a dancer-for-hire. When the dancing work slowed down, she asked the manager to let her sing. Though lacking in musical education of any kind, Holiday’s talent immediately came through. Over the next couple of year, she partnered with a tenor sax player named Kenneth Holan, working small venue and building a reputation. She took her stage-name from two sources: “Billie” from Billie Dove, an actress she admired, and “Holiday” from her long-estranged father, who performed under that name. (She met him as an adult when he played with Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra.) With the Harlem Renaissance in full-swing, people in a position to help her took notice – including John Hammond, the famous impresario/Svengali who played a major role in pushing black jazz and blues into mainstream musical culture. Hammond wasted no time in getting her into a recording studio; Holiday was still 17 years old when she recorded her first songs – “Your Mother’s Son-in-Law” and “Riffin’ the Scotch” – both with a then-unknown Benny Goodman.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 42: Glenn Miller, the Sweetest (and Shortest) of the Bandleaders

With this chapter, we turn to the sweetest and, arguably, the squarest of the Big Band leaders. Also, one of the more polarizing ones:

“Miller discovered a popular formula from which he allowed little departure. A disproportionate ratio of nostalgia to substance keeps his music alive.”
- Doug Ramsey, Jazz Times website (1997; quoted in Wikipedia)

“Can any other record match 'Moonlight Serenade' for its ability to induce a Pavlovian slaver in so many for so long?”
- Gary Giddins, The New Yorker (2004; also Wikipedia)

Alton Glenn Miller was born in Clarinda, Iowa, in 1904 to Lewis and Mattie Lou Miller. The family bounced around quite a bit during his youth – they went from Iowa, to Nebraska, to Missouri, to Colorado – but Miller’s love of music was a constant. He started with a mandolin his father brought home (this was probably Nebraska), but traded it for “an old battered horn” in short order, and practiced so much that his mother once said, “It got to where Pop and I used to wonder if he’d ever amount to anything.” They must have worried even more after he dropped out of the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1923 after failing three of five classes. Playing in any orchestra that would take him – Boyd Senter’s Denver-based orchestra was the main culprit – kept him from his studies, but Miller had already settled on a career as a professional musician two years earlier. The bug bit and he was beyond help.

After touring with various orchestras for the next couple years, Miller landed a solid gig as a trombonist in Ben Pollack’s orchestra out in LA. His solos dried up shortly after of one of the era’s great trombonists, Jack Teagarden, came on board and that little piece of fate nudged him to focus on arranging and composing. Miller started early, writing his first composition, “Room 1411,” with another aspiring musician, Benny Goodman; Wikipedia had something about him writing his signature song, “Moonlight Serenade,” during this period using the “Schillinger system,” but, as much as it adds up, that’s the only reference I saw to that. He took his newfound craft seriously enough to publish a songbook titled, Glenn Miller’s 125 Jazz Breaks for Trombone in 1928.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 41: Artie Shaw, "Musically Restless" Is a Euphemism

I will never see this photo the same way.

I reviewed just two sources for this shallow dive into Artie Shaw - his Wikipedia page, plus a fairly lengthy article titled "The Trouble with Artie Shaw" on a site called Jazz in Europe - but those gave me the essential yin and yang that, based some earlier reading, matches my impression of Shaw. The Jazz in Europe piece unsparingly examines the great clarinetist’s flaws - the word “sociopath” repeats like a refrain - while the Wikipedia page leans into his preferred reputation of a frustrated genius. To start with an odd bit of framing:

“A self-proclaimed ‘very difficult man,’ Shaw was married eight times. Two marriages were annulled; the others ended in divorce: Jane Cairns (1932–33; annulled); Margaret Allen (1934–37); actress Lana Turner (1940); Betty Kern, the daughter of songwriter Jerome Kern (1942–43); actress Ava Gardner (1945–46); Forever Amber author Kathleen Winsor (1946–48; annulled); actress Doris Dowling (1952–56), and actress Evelyn Keyes (1957–85).”

Shaw abused Turner emotionally to the point of a nervous breakdown. That sense of anger and disdain for others - to really drive this home, when asked about his kids, Shaw came back with, “Why should I bother? I didn’t get along with their mothers, why should I try to get along with them?” - very likely drove Shaw to seek out creative pathways that would set him apart from his peers. If he got over them, all the better. Jazz in Europe acknowledges his “massive talent” as a clarinetist, but, for lack of a better phrase, shit all over Shaw’s pretentiousness and his abilities as a composer. Time to tell his story.

“I thought that because I was Artie Shaw I could do what I wanted, but all they wanted was 'Begin the Beguine.’”

Born Arthur Jacob Arshawsky in 1910, Shaw grew up introverted and pissed-off in New Haven, Connecticut. His parents were Jewish - his mother from Austria, his father from Russia - but he wasn’t raised in a musical household. He came to the career as a self-starter, working to buy his first saxophone by age 13. By age 16, Shaw had switched to the clarinet and left home.

Jazz in Europe’s article opens on a long paragraph that shows how Shaw’s career mirrored his life-long rival, Benny Goodman, but always a step behind (and I could have used several of these for my write-up on Benny Goodman). Like most of his contemporaries, Shaw fell in and out of performing and recording bands through the 1920s, and into the 1930s. He also got knocked off course in a way that few of them did: he ran over and killed a pedestrian. Though cleared of blame for the accident, Shaw lost his cabaret card and two years of resume-building, but he used the time. From Jazz in Europe:

Crash Course Timeline, No. 40: Tommy Dorsey, aka, The Angry One

The beginning...of this story.

Far too many weeks ago, I profiled one half of the famous, tumultuous Dorsey Brothers. In this post, I talk about the brother who made it tumultuous. First, to set the scene:

“Dorsey was also an occasionally mean drunk who was known to fire many of his sidemen if they had an off night. He had an erratic personality, loving a good fight but also being warm and generous much of the time, as long as things went his way.”
- Syncopated Times biography (best of the bunch, fwiw)

“Tommy was always punching someone out.”
- Swingmusic.net biography

“…and so began Dorsey's long-running practice of raiding other bands for talent.”
- Radio Swiss Jazz biography

Finally, from a mash note to both Dorsey and the Swing era, in a post within a post on Swingmusic.net:

“He could be a rugged guy offstage or to work for, but on stage, he was there for the paying customers...and for the kids. In 1946, when the bottom dropped out of the band biz, he was one of the first leaders to cut his price to venues so that not only would he keep his guys working, but so that 'the kids will have something to come dance to' again.”

Tommy Dorsey was born in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania in 1905, 21 months after his older brother Jimmy. Their father, Thomas Francis Dorsey, Sr., was a bandleader, taught them play, they played with literally any musician 9/10th of the people who know something about the era could name, they recorded for the first time starting in the second half of the 1920s, they had formed the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra by then (though they recorded as the Dorsey Brothers Concert Orchestra, the Dorsey Brothers Novelty Orchestra, and the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra from 1928-33), but they only officially debuted it in 1934 at a ballroom up in New England. If that reads rushed, my apologies, but I touched on most of the details in my post on Jimmy Dorsey, and I’d direct anyone who curious about that to that post. For those who feel like they can do with less, this paragraph should catch you up nicely:

Crash Course Timeline, No. 35: The Rajah of Rhythm, The King of Swing, Benny Goodman

Know that I know what it took to make him smile....

Somewhere in the middle of 1935, shortly after a strike at Nabisco put NBC’s Let’s Dance on ice and gently flopping as a replacement for Guy Lombardo’s Orchestra at Manhattan’s Roosevelt Grill, Benny Goodman reformed an orchestra and took it on a cross-country tour. Or something like that; Wikipedia’stimeline is fer shit.

The band left with a couple of Goodman’s all-time hits to support - “King Porter Stomp” and “Sometimes I’m Happy” had just come out as a 78 rpm - and they had some successes as they went, particularly a show in Pittsburgh that saw young fans dancing in the aisles, but that proved an outlier. They arrived at Oakland’s McFadden Theater on August 19, 1935, expecting more the same, but instead they received the most rapt reception they’d had on the entire tour. When they played Pismo Beach the following night, they didn’t know what to expect…but, when yet another audience stayed polite and seated, they wrote off the McFadden gig as a fluke. Goodman et. al. had no reason to believe they’d just walked up to the cusp of history; nothing to that point had indicated otherwise.

After setting up at Los Angeles’ Palomar Ballroom on August 21, 1935, Goodman’s orchestra opened with stock arrangements. Faced with a muted response, Goodman and his orchestra put their heads together and decided to kick off the second set with arrangements by Fletcher Henderson and Spud Murphy. Somewhere in that huddle, Goodman’s drummer, Gene Krupa, reportedly rallied behind the decision with this:

“If we're gonna die, Benny, let's die playing our own thing.”

Not only did Goodman, Krupa, Bunny Berigan and singer Helen Ward not die, the crowd at the Palomar went just as nuts as the crowd at McFadden’s. Music historians credit the Goodman Orchestra’s three-week engagement at the Palomar with officially kicking off The Swing Era. Other bands, some led by Goodman proteges, others by outcasts from Goodman’s orchestra, would join a musical movement that dominated American popular music for most of the next decade. Goodman’s great night at the Palomar was and wasn’t an accident - and for reasons I’ll get into below - but, as a music writer named Donald Clarke put it:

“It is clear in retrospect that the Swing Era had been waiting to happen, but it was Goodman and his band that touched it off.”

Crash Course Timeline, No. 23: Introducing the 1930s, Conductors, Crooners, and Big Bands

The medium of the moment.

This post kicks off the exploration of bands and artists from the 1930s, which will extend over the next 21(?) posts in this series. Before digging the selected artist, I wanted to provide a little context for the decade to help put people in the mood for the music.

The 1920s ended with a literal crash, of course, when an overheated, over-leveraged stock market imploded in October 1929. The rot went deeper - farms had been struggling through the 1920s - and soon seeped into every corner of the economy, leading to insolvent banks and the collapse of the consumer economy. Decades of over-farming/grazing in habitats that couldn’t handle it (America’s Great Plains) created the infamous Dust Bowl (it was no spontaneous event), which expanded the misery still further and sent people scrambling to the cities and the coasts in search of work. A popular statistic notes that 25% of Americans couldn’t find work in the depths of the Great Depression, something that points to the long-standing, glass-half-empty that most people (myself flaming included) talk about the news - i.e., that means 75% of the country could. Belts tightened, but the world still turned, basically, as demonstrated by the series of details I mined out of a 1930s timeline.

1930 saw the invention of the analog computer by Vannevar Bush and Clarence Birdseye patented the quick-freezing process that made frozen food possible; the Empire State Building opened for business in 1931 and Congress and President Herbert Hoover made the “Star-Spangled Banner” America’s national anthem the same year; voters swapped Hoover for Franklin Delano Roosevelt the following year and Bruno Hauptmann kidnapped the son of (Nazi afficionado) Charles Lindbergh; the New Deal launched during FDR’s first 100 days in early 1933, which he promoted over the then-common radio with his famous Fireside Chats, and the country collectively decided it needed a damn drink and repealed Prohibition; the Securities and Exchange Commission launched in 1934, along with the Master’s Tournament at Augusta National Golf Club (dude who won it hit only four under par); Social Security started the next year, but wouldn’t pay out benefits until two years later, and Porgy & Bess (“the first distinctly American opera") opened, but Babe Ruth’s career ended; in 1936, a strong majority of Americans handed FDR a second term (he won 62% of the vote) and Jesse Owens took four giant, salutary shits on Hitler’s “master-race” delusion at the Berlin Olympics (one for each gold medal); San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937, first to pedestrians, then to cars; a National Minimum Wage was set at $0.25 in 1938 and Orson Welles broadcast his radio drama, War of the Worlds; and, finally, the United States held not one but two big, optimistic World’s Fairs in 1939, one in Queens, New York, the other, San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition: a lot of shit happened, and that’s just about a quarter of it.

Popular culture did what it could to soothe all the trouble and uncertainty by putting on a happy face. For instance:

“Hollywood responded to the economic anxiety that dominated the lives of Americans during the Depression by producing films that maintained a self-conscious optimism.”

Crash Course Timeline, No. 4: Jelly Roll Morton...Which Was as Dirty as It Sounds

That's really him. "Jelly roll" is a tough search.

Jelly Roll Morton claimed to have invented jazz in 1902, which, according to one record would have made him 12 years old at the time and, according to another, 17. Most people (or Wikipedia, at least) has 1890 for his year of birth, but Morton claimed 1885. He didn’t have a birth certificate, so the world may never know…

…he does, however, popularly get credit for producing the first published jazz composition: the semi-autobiographical “Jelly Roll Blues” way back in 1915. (That version will sound pretty damn ragtime, by the way.) His specific contribution aside, Morton became one of the first great names in jazz. Though he was multi-instrumentalist, he mostly played and composed on the piano. He operated all over the country and wrote and arranged scores of jazz numbers and at a time when many of his contemporaries either refused to or couldn’t, as well as ragtime, “stomps,” and several at least titled as “blues.” By leading one of the first “big bands,” he popularized the idea before the big band/swing era of the 1930s. For all that, Morton didn’t leave much for the historical record - and what he did leave, historians take with a grain of salt (bit of a fabulist) - a detail music critic named Scott Yanow summed up like so:

“Jelly Roll Morton did himself a lot of harm posthumously by exaggerating his worth...Morton's accomplishments as an early innovator are so vast that he did not really need to stretch the truth.”

Whenever it happened, Jelly Roll Morton was born in New Orleans as Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe. Reading between the sources, his family seemed reasonably well-to-do, or at least well-established in New Orleans’ Creole community. Squaring that thought with some details of his upbringing takes some doing. His father, a bricklayer named Edward Joseph Lamothe, left when he was three. Louise Hermance Monette, “a domestic worker,” raised him as a single mother until she married a man named William Mouton shortly after Monette's lover left. According to Wikipedia’s account, “Morton” came from an anglicization of “Mouton.” Other sources say differently…

Blackpast.org offers the most romanticized take on his early life, not least by accepting 1885 as his date of birth. It also names a working, lightly-itinerant trombonist named E.P. LaMenthe as his father, and the figure who “encouraged” Morton’s musical abilities. Another source, 64 Parishes, shrugs off the mechanics of his childhood, but brings in a detail that supports both Morton coming from a family of some standing and a particular influence of music within it: