The Sheila Variations

Happy birthday Billie Holiday

"Singing songs like the 'The Man I Love' or 'Porgy' is no more work than sitting down and eating Chinese roast duck, and I love roast duck. I've lived songs like that."

-- Billie Holiday

Please, Billie fans: leave your thoughts, reminsicences, revelations about this aMAZing woman here. I always get inarticulate about musicians who rock me to the core. I never know what to say, or how to say it. I can easily talk about actors, and explain WHAT IT IS, exactly, that I love about them ... but ... I can't do it with musicians.

My friend Mitchell is a genius at that. He can talk eloquently about what Roberta Flack's specific gift was, for example - in terms of context, and where she came from, and the ground from which she sprung, and how that informed her style of singing ... etc. He can SPEAK to the details.

So I would love to hear what she means to those who love her.

In the meantime, here is one of my favorite stories about Billie Holiday. And I feel kind of cool because this is first-hand information. Or - perhaps I should say second-hand. It was told to me by someone who was THERE.

Billy Crystal told this story when he came and did a seminar at my school. He had kind of an extraordinary childhood. His father managed a very famous, at the time, music store on 42nd Street (Commodore Music Shop), and his uncle was Milt Gabler, founder of the jazz label Commodore Records . So Billy Crystal's childhood was filled with memories of all of the jazz greats basically hanging out in his family living room.

Billie Holiday was Billy Crystal's babysitter.

Okay, can you get that? She BABYSAT for him.

The image of that is just too bizarre and funny to even imagine.

Anyway, here is one of the stories Crystal told to us. And of course he's a wonderful mimic, so he could do all the voices ... you'll just have to fill the mimicry part in in your head.

He was 4 or 5 years old, and Billie Holiday, his babysitter (uhm - WHAT??) took him to see Shane. It was a life-changing experience for Crystal. The movie went through him like a bullet. He watched the entire thing sitting on Billie Holiday's lap, the two of them absolutely silent, enraptured, riveted. He didn't move. She didn't move. They didn't eat popcorn or candy, nothing. They just STARED up at the REVELATION that was Shane.

Then came the famous last scene.

The small child's voice echoing: "Come back, Shane..." (Crystal did the echo when he told the story) "come ba-ack sha-ane...shane... shane..."

Crystal, a small boy, perched on Holiday's lap, couldn't move, couldn't speak. He held out hope. He held out hope that Shane would, indeed, "come back".

Then he heard Holiday say, from behind him, in a tone of blunt bitter to-herself resignation, "He ain't never comin' back."

Kinda says it all. Happy birthday, Lady Day.

Posted by sheila