Jazz Music Club

Examining a jazz standard should require looking at not just the first recording of a tune, but the most popular. “Strange Fruit,” though, finds both of those things in the Billie Holiday version. Her singing is rightly considered the basis for each version that was to come afterwards.

Holiday’s recording of the song, in not just its initial incarnation, but each subsequent version that was put to tape, finds the singer belting out couplets at the slowest pace possible. It’s inarguable that the words comprising “Strange Fruit” trump any musical accompaniment that the song has found over time. Read more

It’s not surprising that Bechet’s version followed that of Holliday’s pretty quickly. Both were issued in 1939 with the vocal rendition receiving a great deal more attention than Bechet’s instrumental lament.

The time that these two earlier versions of the song were recorded, the States were enmeshed in an economic climate that decimated the vast majority of its citizenry. There were roaming hordes of farmers from the Midwest without a destination or a plan during the Great Depression. The lower classes were ostensibly relegated to living day to day on scraps of food while the rich, who were affected to a certain degree, remained relatively unmoved. Read more

Billie Holiday

Born in 1915, Elinore Harris was basically on her own by the time that she was a teenager. Turning to prostitution only yielded more problems. Amongst them, drugs. What Harris’ early life career choice did for her, though, was to put the nascent singer in various situations where jazz served as the soundtrack. Alongside pulling johns, Harris began developing her singing in brothels and other disreputable venues. Taking the last name of her estranged father and coupling it with an actress she admired, Harris became Billie Holiday in front of audiences as her music career began. Read more

A song’s history being as entertaining as the piece of music itself is a rare thing.

“Strange Fruit,” why it was written and how it wound up in the hands of Billie Holiday seem like a series of random occurrences. And at a time when segregation was the norm, even in the North, there weren’t too many places for a white song writer to come into contact with a 24 year old, black, jazz singer. Read more

In discussing the trajectory of jazz as a form of expression a few folks are always going to be touched upon. Before getting into that, though, it’s important to distinguish between disparate players and the time periods in which each played.

The intended purpose of King Oliver and his Creole Jazz band, for instance, is drastically different than whatever the goal of David Sanborn is today. Jazz was for a good long while thought of as a dance music. It may well have been, but the various tributaries that flowed into the genre eventually made it something else.

So despite King Oliver (most likely thinking) in terms of just simple entertainment and David Sanborn looking to extol the virtues of his heroes while attempting to exhibit his musical prowess, there were other folks in between that had their own ideas. Read more

In talking about fusion, it’s obviously impossible to step around Miles Davis. That actually goes for pretty much any sub-genre of the jazz idiom in post-WWII America. Anyway, Davis may not have exactly invented fusion or even perfected it. But it can be said that the players that he worked with in settings that made use of electric instruments went on to record a litany of albums during the ensuing years.

Guitarist John McLaughlin is probably the best known player to come out from the shadow of Davis and his horn – although the Brit bred musician had already amassed an impressive discography prior to working with the trumpeter. Read more

While going to college, one of my closest friends was a business major. I didn’t hold it against him, but I was mystified as to how a guy that was so clearly interested in things of an artistic nature could piddle away his time in classes about marketing products and the like. Eventually, I prevailed upon this gentleman and he switched his major. Art History might not have been my first choice, but it was a far sight better than what was going on before.

Of course, we both eventually graduated and went our separate ways. He became a business type – I should have been there. But recently he told me he was headed to grad school. I held my breath to hear what for. Could he be getting a master’s in Art History? Nope, business. Read more

A time stamp can’t actually be put on the birth of jazz. It’s such a compendium of music and American history that any guess as to when the genre started would just be an approximation or an obtuse idea. The answer as to when all of this started doesn’t actually matter, but what does are the laundry list of innovators and primed musicians. Over its career, however long it’s been, jazz has gifted the American populace with some of the country’s most famous people. Louis Armstrong, obviously, comes to mind. But so does John Coltrane, Miles Davis and yes, even the entirety of the Marsalis family. But without a few other key figures along the way, none of those folks would have wound up where they did. Read more

Chico Hamilton was ahead of his time over and over again. In each disparate decade, the drummer’s proclivity for change pushed him towards some endless searching. But as jazz fans, we should all be thankful considering the band leader was able to introduce the world to players like Gabor Szabo and Larry Coryell. Read more

The best of new recordings in old genres are able to either create some new avenue for a music to go down or fool listeners into thinking that the album is from decade’s past. There’s obviously not a confluence of the two, but if there could be, it’d be pretty likely that Steve Reid, drummer to the stars, would come up with it.

Recording since he was just 17 – and playing for about a year prior to that with Quincy Jones – Reid has cut a career through which he’s been able to perform in any number of genres with a litany of rather famous and well respected players both new and old. Read more