Title: Porgy and Bess Composer: George Gershwin Section of the work to be studied: ‘Summertime’ Interpretation in performance 1: Leontyne Price, from 1:11 to 4:32, Porgy and Bess: High Performance, RCA Interpretation in performance 2: Billie Holiday, The Quintessential Billie Holiday, Vol. 2: 1936, Columbia, this recording is also available on a number of compilation CDs. Score: Summertime, single for voice and piano. Alfred Publishing. (AP.VS5985) The following notes are designed to inform discussion. They are not to be considered as representative of the VCAA or amuse. The notes are to be used as starting points. Paul Curtis 2009 Briefly: Gershwin completed the work in September 1935 following 20 months of work. The show opened on 30 September 1935 at Boston’s Colonial Theatre. The show opened in New York at the Alvin Theatre on 10 October. The show ran for only 124 shows at the Alvin. The critical reaction was mixed and the entire monetary investment was lost. Gershwin wrote the following defense of his work: It is true that I have written songs for Porgy and Bess. I am not ashamed at writing songs at any time so long as they are good songs. In Porgy and Bess I realized that I was writing an opera for the theatre and without songs it could be neither of the theatre nor entertaining from my viewpoint. But songs are entirely within the operatic tradition. Many of the most successful operas of the past have had songs….Of course, the songs in Porgy and Bess are only a part of the whole…I have used symphonic music to unify entire scenes. (Robert Kimball, program notes 1989, Australian production). Gershwin died without seeing the success of his work: he died in 1940. Context and details of Gershwin: First produced in Boston and New York by the Theatre Guild in 1935. The work was not a great success and closed after only 124 performances. Price: recorded 1963, RCA Victor orchestra (won a Grammy); Leontyne Price undertook the role of Bess in the 1952 revival of the show, to much acclaim. Holiday: Recorded: New York, July 10, 1936 Billie Holiday (vocals), Bunny Berigan (trumpet), Artie Shaw (clarinet), Joe Bushkin (piano), Dick McDonough (guitar), Pete Peterson (bass), Cozy Cole (drums) Billie Holiday (vocals), Bunny Berigan (trumpet), Artie Shaw (clarinet), Joe Bushkin (piano), Dick McDonough (guitar), Pete Peterson (bass), Cozy Cole (drums) Recorded: New York, July 10, 1936 Billie Holiday was not the first jazz artist to record "Summertime" (Bob Crosby recorded a transcription version five months earlier) but hers was the first recorded for 78s and probably did more than any other version to establish the song as a potential jazz standard. For any listener of the time who had heard "Summertime" in its operatic version, Holiday's rendition was a shock—raw and dirty with the rasp of Bunny Berigan's trumpet echoed in Holiday's voice. Holiday jettisons nearly the entire melody, flattening out the melodic contour to fit her voice and her artistic sense, and behind her, Berigan and Artie Shaw jam away, sensing even then that this new Gershwin song with its easy harmonic sequence would be a natural for the jazz repertoire Bibliography http://www.jazz.com/music/2008/7/29/billie-holiday-summertime accessed February 09 The Penguin Guide to Jazz One of Holiday’s innovations was to suggest a role for the signer which blended in with the rest of the musicians, improvising a line and taking a ‘solo’ which was as integrated as anything else on the record. On her earlier sides with Wilson as leader, she was still credited as responsible for the ‘vocal refrain’; but the later titles feature ‘Billie Holiday And Her Orchestra’. She starts some records and slips into the middle of others, but always there’s a feeling of a musician at ease with the rest of the band and aware of the importance of fitting into the performance as a whole. Her tone, on the earlier sides, is still a little raw and unformed and the trademark rasp at the edge of voice – which she uses to canny effect on the later titles – is used less pointedly; but the unaffected styling is already present, and these are indications of her mastery of time even at the very beginning. While the most obvious characteristic of her singing is the lagging behind the beat, she seldom sounds tired or slow to respond, and the deeper impression is of a vocalist who knows exactly hoe much time she can take. She never scats, rarely drifts far from the melody, and respects structure and lyrical nuance, even where – as has often been remarked – the material is less than blue-chip. But her best singing invests the words with shades of meaning which vocalists until that point had barely looked at” she creates an ambiguity between what the words say and what she might be thinking which is very hard to distil. And that is the core of Holiday’s mystique. Coupled with the foggy, baleful [menacing, sinister], somber quality of her tone, it creates a vocal jazz which is as absorbing as it is enduring. ++++ Holiday recorded this in New York in July 1936. So it's the young Billie's voice that I always prefer--sultry and yearning and girlish--and she swings it about like a sparkling beaded handbag. The band's (including Artie Shaw on clarinet) martial rat-ta-tat beat and New Orleans-flavored horns give this "Summertime" a hurried street parade feel or play to a decadent afternoon tea dance of wilted flowers, damp limbs and furtive cocaine sniffing. ++++++ Birth name: Eleanora Fagan Gough Name change: Changed her name to "Billie Holiday" because of her admiration for film star "Billie Dove." She was also known as "Lady Day." Birth date: April 7, 1915 Birth place: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Death date: July 17, 1959 Death place: New York City, New York Burial location: Saint Raymond's Cemetery in Bronx County, NY Famous Tagline: "Lady Sings the Blues" Spouse: Louis McKay http://www.cmgww.com/music/holiday/about/fastfacts.htm 28/07/09 accessed February 2009 Billboard 20 Sep 1947 http://books.google.com.au/books?id=QyAEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA48&dq=bill ie+holiday+singing+summertime&lr=&ei=7FFuSoarEYvKlQSTh83tDg 28/07/09 The Jazz Book: From New Orleans to Rock and free Jazz Berendt, Joachim, trans. Dan Morgenstern, Helmut & Barbara Bredigkeit …Billie Holiday, who was among the first to realize the potential of the microphone for a completely new use of the singing voice. It has been said that Billie Holiday’s style, which at the time was felt to be new and “Revolutionary,” consisted mainly in “microphonizing” the voice – in a way of singing unthinkable without the microphone. This “microphonic” style has become so commonplace for all kinds of popular music that hardly anyone mentions it. pg. 44 ++++ Billie was the embodiment of a truth first expressed – I believe- by Fats Waller….: in jazz if does not matter what you do, but how you do it. ….She made her most beautiful recordings in the thirties with [Teddy] Wilson and Lester Young. And in the intertwining of the lines sung by Billie Holiday and the lines played by Lester Young, the question which is lead and which is accompaniment-which line is vocal and which instrumental-here becomes secondary. Billie Holiday is the great songstress of understatement. Her voice has none of the volume and majesty of Bessie Smith. It is a small, supple, sensitive voice –yet Billie sang a song which, more than anything sung by Bessie Smith and the other female blues singers, became a musical protests against racial discrimination…. Billie Holiday’s way of understatement is more effective than the grandest gesture and the most passionate, unrestrained expression. The restraint and caution of understatement are more powerful. Listening to Billie Holiday, one felt that everything really was much more weighty than she stated it, and so each listener was forced to supply from within what he required for a full emotional measure. Thus the avalanche of internal activity one always heard about when Billie Holiday appeared was set into motion. Yet there is also pathos in Billie Holiday’s singing…. A cool tenor saxophone was almost always the yardstick for comparisons with good modern ballad singing until the late fifties, and this, too, may be traced back to Billie Holiday. Billie’s singing has the elasticity of Lester Young’s tenor playing-and she had this elasticity prior to her first encounter with Lester. Billie was the first artist in all of jazz-not just the first woman or the first jazz singer- in whose music the influence of the saxophone as the style and sound-setting instrument becomes clear. And this took place, only seemingly in paradoxical fashion, before the beginning of the saxophone era, which actually only began with the success of Lester Young in the early forties….Modern jazz really began in the realm of song, with Billie Holliday. pp. 328-9 ++++ In the last years of her life, Billie Holiday’s voice was often a mere shadow of her great days. She sang without the suppleness and glow of the earlier recordings; her voice sounded worn, rough and old. Still, her singing had magnetic powers. It is extraordinary to discover just how much a great artist has left when voice and technique and flexibility have failed and nothing remains except the spiritual power of creativity and expression. Billie Holiday stands at the center of great jazz singing. Her important recordings with Teddy Wilson, Lester Young, and other greats of the Swing era are convincing testimony to the fact that the dilemma of jazz singing affects only lesser practitioners.