Golden Arms and Glasses: When Algren Met Holiday
Posted in Jazz Notes on Jul 15th, 2008
Novelist Nelson Algren and singer Billie Holiday are two iconic figures of mid-20th-century American culture, though Holiday’s name and visage–not to mention her voice–is surely better-known and remembered than Algren’s is today. (At least Starbucks hasn’t taken to hawking copies of The Man With the Golden Arm at the coffee counter yet.) Algren, perhaps, made the mistake of living too long and fading into relative obscurity before his death in 1981.
In 1939 and 1940 Billie Holiday recorded a handful of poignant songs co-written by a good friend of hers, Irene Wilson (later known as Irene Kitchings). Wilson was grieving over the breakup of her marriage to pianist Teddy Wilson, and “Some Other Spring,” in particular, was said to have been inspired by her loss. Before her marriage to Wilson (whom she influenced in many ways, introducing him to classical music and accelerating his development as a piano player), she had worked in Chicago (under the names of Irene Armstrong and Irene Armstrong Eadie) as the leader of an all-female jazz trio called Three Classy Misses…
I listen to a lot of Billie Holiday. This, given the fact that she’s ubiquitous (as a friend once said a few years ago, explaining why he liked her but rarely sought out her recordings, “She’s kind of like the Beatles”), part of the coffee-chain soundtrack for the 21st century (not sayin’ that that’s necessarily a bad thing either). It’s partly that Holiday was one of the first jazz singers I fell in love with; I used to bicycle miles and miles to an LP store in Indianapolis to buy the Columbia Quintessential volumes as they were being released, and those early sides are forever associated…
Louis Armstrong was a legendary innovative trumpeter, a vocalist who had a profound impact on jazz singing, and a dynamic entertainer–and he got a chance to showcase all these aspects of his talent in 28 full-length films and several short features in which he appeared between 1931 and 1969. We’ll celebrate Armstrong’s birthday with…
Although there had been tribute LPs to other artists before Billie Holiday–Bix Beiderbecke and Fats Waller among them–the concept really took off in the two years before and after Holiday’s death in 1959, as six albums dedicated to the iconic singer…
Sometimes when a great jazz musician dies, another jazz musician writes a musical tribute. On this Memorial Day weekend edition of Night Lights we’ll hear elegies for Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Sonny Clark, Clifford Brown, Billie Holiday and more, from artists such as Lennie Tristano, Bill Evans…
This edition of Night Lights is a salute to warmer weather with “Let’s Spring One,” including music from Ike Quebec, Thelonious Monk & Milt Jackson, Anita O’Day, Nat King Cole, Charlie Parker, June Christy…
