I’m listening to Billie Holiday and I kinda wish I wasn’t. In the early 80s I went through a Billie Holiday stage. I binged on Billie for a couple of months, had her in heavy heavy rotation , and dove tailed out of it depressed and feeling my age (25 if memory serves) and looking straight down at a shot glass and a shotgun because in the end if Billie had a happy ending I’d feel like the songs were songs of hope.
But she didn’t and they aren’t.
You don’t go to Billie for happiness or even for a reason to live, but you go to her so that these things that you are feeling, this depth of emotion, I mean depth of bad emotion, depth of the bad stuff where in the end you are totally alone and surrounded by a sort of gravityless feeling that has a reality outside of you… like with Billie she sends you into a free floating sort of vertiginous sinking to nowhere, like swimming in mud, but it is also a life raft, something real to cling to.
Jazz is like Gospel without the God, they are secular songs of freedom, like hope, sex, dance, the joy of just being alive, Armstrong, Ellington, even a little earlier, guys like Joe “King” Oliver, in the brothels of New Orleans and the riverboats for the white folks, these were songs to lead you out of the dark and into somewhere else. But Billie wasn’t about that; she was about the tug, the heartbreak the loss of freedom, the jailed up horror as she struggled through teenage prostitution, racism and drug addiction.
In 1981 I was heavy into suicidal mode, maybe eight years of one damn thing after another had worn me down and while it was perhaps not unnatural I would find Billie (my other big band at the time was Joy Division) , once I got past those days, months, years, I never returned to Billie. Her voice alone could put me in a tailspin. Have you ever read William Golding’s “Darkness Visible” (from Milton: “There is no light but darkness visible”), well even if you haven’t read it it’s still the sense I get from Billie Holiday, that she seemed to walk out of the fire , spend some time with us, then walk back into the fire.
I’ve been listening to Billie today, almost by accident. Somebody claimed I was being mean to them and the old (Billie recorded it in 1937) “Mean To Me” came to mind and I spent the rest of the day listening to Billie but I am not depressed enough for it to hold me the way it can.
I will be some day, that’s just in the nature of aging, there will come a time when I will return to her when there is no light but I will need darkness visible.
