Billie Holiday's Art: interpretation of a lyric versus vocal improvisation

Abstract: Edward Lee comments that "The [jazz] singer...was confronted with the problem of reconciling straight versions of sentimental songs and intractable words with the vastly different jazz ethos. That any succeeded at all is remarkable". In fact, he continues, "the style which Billie Holiday used so creatively was not a beginning but an end…music arising directly and without compromise from the Afro-American tradition came to achieve mass acceptability". Billie Holiday created the concept of a jazz vocalist, and remains its supreme exemplar. Her recordings from the 1930s and 40s, cheaply-made for the juke-box, have the consoling power of art, and are unequalled for interpretative genius in jazz or any other musical genre. 

Holiday is both an interpreter and an improviser, but with the distinctive quality that the improvisation serves the interpretation rather than distracting from or undermining it. She is the supreme vocal interpreter of a lyric – a rare example of a singer who sings the words as if they mean something for her. In contrast is the work of Karin Krog and Sarah Vaughan, which have failures in interpretation. I examine the sense in which Holiday's singing is horn-like, and improvisational, and consider the contrast between her early and late career. Finally I look at other great interpreters of a lyric, if not quite on Holiday's level – Monica Zetterlund, Nina Simone and Betty Carter, and among living singers, Sheila Jordan, Karin Krog, Carmen Lundy and Rene Marie. 

Bio: 

Andy Hamilton studied at St Andrews University for his MA, M.Phil and PhD. His PhD (1987), was "The Self and Self-Consciousness", supervised by Crispin Wright. He subsequently taught at every pre-Thatcherite university in Scotland except Aberdeen and Glasgow, was a Leverhulme Research Fellow at Sheffield 1988-90, and then a Lecturer at Stirling and Keele before arriving at Durham in 1994. He has supervised a range of PhD students in philosophy of mind and aesthetics. He has been working on the topic of self-consciousness since his Ph.D., although he now recognises that it is simply too difficult. However, he has published several articles on it in Philosophical Quarterly, European Journal of Philosophy and Australasian Journal of Philosophy; and a monograph, "The Self in Question: Memory, the Body and Self-Consciousness", is published by Palgrave Macmillan (2013). His areas of research are Philosophy of Mind, History of 19th and 20th Century Philosophy, and Wittgenstein, but he is now working more in Aesthetics and Political Philosophy, and has published articles in British Journal of Aesthetics. A monograph, "Aesthetics and Music", was published by Continuum in 2007, and a book on improvisation, "The Art of the Improviser", written with jazz saxophonist Lee Konitz, appeared in the same year, published by Michigan University Press. The Routledge Philosophy Guidebook "Wittgenstein and On Certainty" appeared in 2014.

He is a jazz pianist and writes for "The Wire" and other contemporary music magazines, on jazz, contemporary composition and improvised music. This expertise has led to the creation of an Impact Case Study on "Aesthetics of Improvisation", for REF 2014. A workshop on the topic, involving leading musicians from jazz, improvised music and contemporary composition, was held in Durham in May 2013, and a further workshop will take place in April 2016, as part of a project for REF 2020.