Guest Musings - Joe Milazzo

Jazz writer Joe Milazzo, a close member of our extended family, discusses images, idols, and the deception of pathos in his essay, Reunions.

Show him he's welcome.

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Reunions

[Lester Young] had become an alcoholic, and his playing had become ghostly and uncertain. He still wore suits and a porkpie hat, but he sat down a lot, and when he appeared on the CBS television show "The Sound of Jazz" in 1957, he was remote and spaced out. He refused to read his parts for the two big band numbers. (Ben Webster, who had been taught by Young's father, replaced him.) When he took a chorus during Billie Holiday's blues "Fine and Mellow", his tone was intact, but the solo limped by. The loving, smiling expression on Billie Holiday's face may have indicated that she was listening not to the Lester beside her but to the Lester long stored away in her head. Whitney Balliett, "Pres" (1981)

Haven't we all quarreled with our memory? Fickle, selective, and seeming to delight in contradicting us for contradiction's sake, memory is hardly the kind of friend we would call upon when we would most need someone to come to our defense. Yet your memory bears the truest witness to your character, even when that witness is as unexpected as having a drink clapped in your face or finding that a secret has been betrayed. Let's face it, you and your memory have more dirty laundry to air than any celebrity couple. In some regards, human remembering is not unlike any artist, whose work must, at some point, become dislodged from its personality in order to be understood. I don't offer this as any original insight of my own devising, but rather as an explication of why what follows might appear to aim wide of what you know you've seen and heard.

It happened the other day, or, rather, the other day set in motion a whole chain of events that have brought me to the point of apology. The inherent problem of apology -- you must hear me out first. I was trying to tell another friend of mine about the moment in the old 1957 CBS SOUND OF JAZZ broadcast when Billie Holiday and Lester Young were reunited on stage. Trying to tell him about what went out over the air and what I know from being recycled as a clip in any number of jazz-related documentaries and biography films. An excerpt is all it is, it exists often as something intended by its cullers to be representative, archetypal. Or maybe it's all they can find to stick underneath their own narratives, to turn into an illustration in motion. I was trying to tell this friend of mine something about what I comprehend about the troublesome importance of seeing as well as hearing a performance. But also I was using it as a platform from which to discuss that there is some unfairness, advantaging and disadvantaging, in the added visual information, of having too much context (read: being a nerd or geek about a given subject), about giving yourself too much to consider. Like "Lady" and "Prez", nicknames bestowed upon one another, so we are told, more out of respect than of romantic intimacy. Does that render the names themselves more aloof, less indicative of passion? But recall that, traditionally in African-American culture, a nickname must be earned. You can't claim a nickname for yourself; you have to be recognized, in fact, to have emerged into recognizability. Suddenly, you have real features, qualities, history. You can be called. You've been understood at some level, which is pretty close to being loved.

THE SOUND OF JAZZ, 1957... Billie sings, Lester solos, and something transpires that each time I saw it, struck me again and again as always unforgettable. Ill, beaten down, on records from the era run into occasional ruts of routine and ambition turned to diffidence, there's still a majesty active in them both. I don't recall the song that's the occasion for this performance at all right now, which says something about what's to come, what I do remember. Billie has just finished a phrase, and Lester takes his solo; nothing new there. There's a cut we follow to a different camera and a new angle. Lester, known for that zig-zagging slouch of head -- inclined -- and tenor sax -- winging -- tilts not at all as he plays. I'd hesitate to call his posture ramrod, but there is a direct vertical propriety to how he comes to where he stands, his face in profile filling the screen. Of course you're struck by his sound and the melody he constructs. Its beyond blues, so simple and delicately inflected its beyond song and it enters the realm of tactile impressions: Lester's melody like a single brushstroke seen untracking from the height of the painting hand itself. Billie is now at the right half of the screen, a black dress with white trim, a definitely womanly form, but soft-edged. She carries her voluptuousness. But what you really notice is Lester's face, or rather the faces Lester makes. You don't know right away whether its all voluntary, or comes from the fact that playing what he plays on his tenor requires "chops", a re-making of his mouth around this implement he's stuck between his lips, close to his throat, not something to smoke like a cigar, to chew like jerky or gum, or suck like a sourball. And the strain spreads or emerges across his face in contingent expressions. Or is there an deliberate communication? I know from reading on another subject -- dyslexia and its cousin dsyphemia (stammering) -- that it may take more than 100 muscles, operating throughout the neck, chest and head, to cooperate in the molding of air into a single spoken word. What's required of plump-jawed Lester to make notes, besides mere intelligence? The regulation of breath by the epiglottis; baffling using the acoustical panels of the hard and soft palates; the placement of teeth into gestures of biting, filing, clenching, grinding, sawing; caving his cheeks in and out, bellows whose inner walls have a pink roughness of veins that roughens even more as they dry and turn pasty; wrapping his tongue as a secondary (primary?) reed. I'm not mechanically inclined, and the details are probably off, but it's as if one had to take one's mouth apart and rebuild it to speak the language of this lung-shaped brass instrument that's so ingenious its profoundly stupid; all its instructions have to be so consistent. Does it take as many muscles and more complex interactions of neurological relaying and athletic talent to form and expel words, or to make these notes on the saxophone? More? Less? Which ones, in what combinations and what's left to desuetude?

So there is Lester's mouth, already a feat, and then he does something with his eyes, or, more properly, that broad part of his face that includes the eyes -- a raising of brow and the forehead, though it is literally compressed, seems to grow -- ridges, not furrowings of anger. Lester's forehead is a promontory swept clean of his hair (which is anyway old-man, unkempt fringes in back, a curling behind the ears and against his collar). You can see the footprints of whatever is passing through his mind laid down on that promontory. But whatever is passing, it is emotions, each with its own bearing and gait? Nothing's definitive; and then Lester turns his head once or twice and even back and forth a little, not enough turning to make a head-shake. We know what "head-shaking" is as a gesture and that's just too easy for oblique, lyrical Lester. Young as I am, callow, wanting too much significance from everything I encounter, still I feel I am witnessing a man making decisions about a dear friend as Lester plays, a man reaching conclusions that, though he knows they offer him some self-protection, he also knows they have only so much permanence. And there's this detour of a notion, sex between Billie and Lester, what E.E. Cummings called "achieving the togethercoloured instant". But I'll take a different license here.

Basically, Lester's expression is this: a languid blink, a parting of the lips to feint a sound, and [i]his eyebrows peek up over his own mask of passivity. Is he sounding-out surprise, to paraphrase my belief in Balliett's famous formulation, and if so, at himself or Billie or at the two of them, estranged until this moment? Is it a sad moment, rueful, forgiving and forbearing? No, it thrills, and I don't know why, exactly. A man, a woman: both people loved others, but both more and less than they loved either themselves or each other. Yet I wonder if I'm not seeing something I should not see? Does privacy matter in art? Especially when the form in question involves declarations of love, words amplified, sometimes with an answer, by the music that is ostensibly the scenery and gilt. Can we demarcate the "work" as easily as that? Why else would I digress, even superficially, into question of musculature and facial expressions, whatever their cause, unless I take the position that, more in music than in dance and acting, one's body is as much a basic material as the abstract proportions governing pitch relationships? My God, when I hear Billie sing, I really am hearing some loosening of internal visceral forces that tell me many things about their intimate origins. And the more unusual or unexpected the sound, the more intimate it becomes, because the questions I have are more sharply impertinent and probe even deeper. (It occurs to me that I know I make faces when I listen to music, both in empathy and in antipathy to what I hear.) I'm put then (suddenly?) in mind of something I once read about a song and it dragging the listener through "the keyhole of private obsession" -- Lester Bands writing about Van Morrison's "T.B. Sheets". Is voyeurism inevitable here? And can voyeurism be invited in?

Lester sings with his horn. You listen to him and can almost hear the words. People think he's so cocky and secure, but you can hurt his feelings in two seconds. I know, because I found out once that I had. Billie Holiday and William Duffy, "Lady Sings the Blues" (1956)

Two days after this telling (now re-told), I went back and watched the entire SOUND OF JAZZ broadcast. As it turns out, the performance in question is a protracted version of "Fine and Mellow". The band, which spotlights many other reunions, is arranged in a rough approximation of a circle, facing in (we see Billie's back as the band begins). Ben Webster solos before Lester, and this other ex-boyfriend's playing is far more demonstrative. The man nicknamed "The Brute" uses his eyes and neck and jabs of his chin to communicate a depth of self-absorbed passion, Billie looking on appreciatively. And she's not wearing some evening finery, but plaid slacks and a white cardigan. She looks positively casual, this may have been the producer's idea, what do I know or care about it? Except Billie must have known what it would mean for her to wear white on television for the "Tiffany network", the possibility of the old kinescope's burning up with the light reflected from her wardrobe. My father's told stories of white gowns blowing out cameras at old Academy Awards ceremonies. And Lester, rapidly moving toward the microphone passes in front of and obscures Billie's wide-eyed... she looks somehow worried, or furious for being worried... as Ben moves out of his solo. Lester looks twice as frail as I remembered. He seems to float against the shadows of the other saxophonists (Coleman Hawkins is seen momentarily in pentimento as a wide hat brim, light gray on darker gray) as he plays. And he's not even on camera for his entire 12 bars, and, while he is on camera, he hardly moves at all. Lester could already be dead, but for his face, the heaviness of it, his expressions struggling towards some animation. Lester, whose features alternate in surviving photographs between quizzical and melancholy, resembles nothing so much as a former beauty queen grown fat -- the sheen on his face can't disguise that he's been consumed by something. (And consumption this intense is its own brand of asceticism.) Not Billie, who, despite her apparent relaxation, even luxuriating in the music itself here, still looks ready for any leap. All the significance of Lester's bearing is in the pause, the wait, the moments before and after he decides to open and close a musical phrase. His fingers stir up once in a four-fingered clench off the keys of the horn, the camera pans down from his face to the bell of his horn, black. I'm shocked to see how staged it all is, how carefully composed. "Shocked"? Maybe disappointed. I wanted reality and found instead craft, and some rift opens up in my faith in the efficacy of the listening experience. I want everything to impend, to matter, to come into a design. But, so much of the time, aren't we just filling up silence with what we would imagine? The reactions I had ascribed to Lester are mostly Billie's. She nods, and half-smiles, and appears to be interpreting on the fly. And there is real affection in her reactions. The edit from the issuing void of Lester's tenor, taxonomized as cool, to Billie, skin even a shade less dark in the harsh lighting of the studio, posed like a bust of herself, in fact, her hair is pulled back so severely and the way he large silver ear-rings (clunky hearts spinning in rings, silver) elongate her earlobes, one side of her head looks flattened. In one shot, she looks remarkably like the two central figures in Picasso's "Les demoiselles d´Avignon" -- that said in full acknowledgment of that canvas' relation to African art and ceremonial objects. And more to the point, even understanding how the angles given to us reflect the "blocking" of the scene, translating 2 dimensions to 3, Billie could be watching anything. Knowing what tricks memory plays, can we say what percentage of a great interpretation is willed and which is accident?

So, despite all the conflation and de-revelation and probable ordinariness of this reunion of two musicians who had reached perfection on those 1930's Okeh and Brunswick recordings, I don't think it does come down to the voyeurism implicit in Bang's metaphor. I don't feel voyeuristic watching Lester and Billie here. Billie and Lester, two raw materials brought into concord, into concert, or at least together and bound with some unique medium that enhances even as it renders them inextricable. Did each partner understand his or her own properties and the properties of the other, the consequences, long- and short-term, of existing in the same frame, connected by this common force? If I test myself, I realize that I don't think that Lester can't control himself as he plays, that the emotions of which I think I see evidence come unbidden and spring from some part of himself he has forgotten until just now. Hardly, he's a jazz musician, an improvisor of the first order. He knows the moment, he's canvassed it and all it portends in terms of career and caress, and he knows he can exert control over the moment. "T.B. Sheets", Van being one of THAT Lester's own obsessions: Van as mystical vocalist of sublime syllabic distortions and fragmentary lyrics that sound as if warped and broken by their own symbolic weight. Surely Bangs had played the song over and over and worn the record down to a thin, malleable, relatively indistinct nub. The only features ultimately identifiable are the big ones Bangs would have noticed long ago; he sees not so much what Morrison recorded, but what his own listening has made, the 33 1/3 rpm stereo (bi-directional) grooves are indistinguishable from his own fingerprints on the reflective black surface of the vinyl. But so what? By the time Lester finishes and is off-camera, I know, as if I had seen it all unfold first-hand and had not had the camera see it for me, that something has transpired. I am trusting myself and some assumptions, hopefully not arrogant, about my perspicacity, as much as I am the close-ups and contrast and depth of focus. Billie and Lester: a subject written about and over so many times that when you see it aspects of the grain and scratches and image pinching in THE SOUND OF JAZZ (funny name for a film, huh?) seem to be the residual elements of the speculations, rumors, attempts to elevate these two damaged and battering individuals to a certain doomed status. And I could make it even simpler. Something back behind my heart tells me I should be happy to see them like this again, that I can believe in the fiction of wholly reconciliation, that, of course, the singer and the soloist always cared about one another and amourousness, so long thwarted, has again burst through in song. All this tells me, however, is that the voyeurism I fear is really a spying upon myself, or watching out to see who might detect and apprehend me as I intrude.

Were Billie and Lester great lovers? Are they're performances imbued with some documentary quality, however sublimated? How am I to know? More importantly, how am I to redeem all information I've collected? What if I try see Billie and Lester through the eyes one of their possible pasts and make a character of their relationship, now embodied as an old friend who has kept up with them both despite the personal distance they must keep from one another, walking into a room they assumed was empty only to stumble over the sight of the two of them in embrace. "What?" A great, expectorated "What?" This kind of friend is not scandalized, or is scandalized just briefly, and the sense of betrayal, as well as stupidity for never guessing that... soon dissipates. To pay attention is to linger, and live moves very fast, people even faster. To take the point-of-view of a relationship, a hazy -- not ghostly -- presence that it has moved into the field of vision. Is that too dissonant? Perhaps not, but it requires a certain willingness to confidence that our imaginations can budge us out of one consciousness and into another. Those "decisions" I said earlier belonged to Lester's, they aren't judgments per se, but rather those observations -- not objective, ultimately, but decisions can be struck from any situation as hot as sparks -- you've had when you seem to have stepped into the guise of some composite character from your own life story, a personage whose experiences are all known but sometimes from your vantage, sometimes from the vantage of "them". And what do they -- Billie and Lester, once involved -- really think of the intruder they've discovered, the new relationship so close to being consummated between them?

The famous "Sound of Jazz" television program in December [1957]... showed on the recording made at the rehearsal a tantalizing snatch of Lester playing an obbligato to Billie Holiday on "Fine and Mellow." This fragment give breathtaking insight into the new rapport that could have developed between Lester and Billie, and the mystery of why [Norman] Granz did not record them together in the fifties, when he had them both under contract, is something somebody should ask him about. Graham Colombè, "Time and the Tenor: Lester Young in the Fifties" (1974)

~ Joe Milazzo

Posted by al on April 16, 2003 12:20 PM