Empowerment and Love 2.
(You won’t make much sense of this valentine blog unless you watch Billie Holiday’s 8-minute performance with a group of the best of jazzmen from the 1950s. Also, pay close attention to a voice over she does that tells you exactly what is coming.)
What the blues seems to be able to do like no other musical form is to wrap the joy of loving around the pain of loving. If that is so, then what Billie Holiday and a gang of awesome male horn players do with “Fine and Mellow” in the 1957 CBS live performance of “The Sounds of Jazz” may just be one of the finest expressions of this power. It expresses pain with such beauty. And it is a pain with only hints of suffering:
Love is just like a faucet
It turns off and on
Sometimes when you think it's on, baby
It has turned off and gone
As Billie sings with an effortless purity of voice you cannot help but feel intensely that kind of pain of a woman wanting “her man” who just can’t/won’t be there for her. It is, however, not only that. It is a universal yearning by all kinds of beings. Men go through it as well. We have witnessed bonobos suffering great grief. Still, this song and her growing sense of loss is very human specific:
My man don't love me
Treats me oh so mean
But then, over and over, just after a pause between beats you begin seeing her in sheer pleasure as she listens to the various male solos that are played in between her singing each of the song’s verses. It’s as if she’s showing us what the “lowest man that she’s ever seen” is missing out on. While listening, Billie is not in any pain. No suffering at all. She is in a “fine and mellow” ecstasy, simply letting the incredibly beautiful and sensual music of the sax, trombone and trumpet solos penetrate her body and allowing her body to do its thing in response. She is as all there in her body and her pleasure just as she is in her voice when letting that pain of unfulfilled wanting come forth with overpowering understatement but not with any kind of begging or “woe is me” suffering:
But you're so mean to me, baby
I know you're gonna drive me away.
And then back again to the male horn solos, where she lets his music love her so “fine and mellow.” She sways and rocks; smiles and nods; glistens and rolls with utter sensuality. A sensuality so subtle. Her abandonment is as understated as the voicing of the pain she knows so well. She is totally present. The men playing their solos are also. They saturate her with the sounds of their horns, and you, listening, are penetrated as well by the beauty and the power and the love of their playing.
But Billie is the centerpiece of the performance, the focus of their male loving. And she is completely there for it just as she is when she turns to use her voice to be so completely inside the pain of the woman who owns this song. In both she is one with her art. Fully being all her truths in that long, extended, exquisite moment.
Happy Valentine
The Lyrics:
My man don't love me
Treats me oh so mean
My man, he don't love me
Treats me awful mean
He's the lowest man
That I've ever seen
He wears high-draped pants
Stripes are really yellow
He wears high-draped pants
Stripes are really yellow
But when he starts in to love me
He's so fine and mellow
Love will make you drink and gamble
Make you stay out all night long
Love will make you drink and gamble
Make you stay out all night long
Love will make you do things that you know is wrong
But if you treat me right daddy
I'll stay home every day
If you treat me right daddy
I'll stay home every day
But you're so mean to me, baby
I know you're gonna drive me away
Love is just like a faucet
It turns off and on
Love is just like a faucet
It turns off and on
Sometimes when you think it's on, baby
It has turned off and gone
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