“Living for you is easy living, It’s easy to live when you’re in love”… And later, the bridge… “For you, maybe I’m a fool, But it’s fun, People say you rule me with one wave of your hand, Darling it’s grand, They just don’t understand…”
Have you ever heard this great Billie Holiday version of Easy Living - the Ralph Rainger/Leo Robin song, written for a movie of the same title? I’m listening to it now, as I write this. The musicians are Buck Clayton (trumpet), Buster Bailey (clarinet), Lester Young (tenor sax), Teddy Wilson (piano) Freddie Green (guitar), Walter Page (bass) Jo Jones (drums) and Billie Holiday (vocal) - recorded in New York, June 1, 1937. It starts with Wilson’s piano, handed off to Bailey’s clarinet, then Lester Young’s sublime tenor sax, and back to Wilson before Billie’s vocal takes you - or takes me, at least, away.
I could say that I’ll wait until you’ve had a chance to find it in your record collection, or, more likely, on Spotify, so you can listen to it, too, but that would leave a blank space in my essay. So find it later. It’s not very long. Billie recorded other versions, but this one’s my favorite.
I didn’t discover the song, or Billie, either, until the summer of 1959, twenty-two years after it was recorded and when I was fourteen years old. Billie died in ’59, too, on July 17, at the age of 44, making me think, or hope, I guess, that she was alive when I discovered her. I remember where I was… standing in a record store on South Tacoma Way, with the album jacket in my hands and the tune playing on the store’s scratchy speakers - back then you could listen before you bought!
It wasn’t my first introduction to jazz. For a while I loved Earl Bostic’s upbeat rendition of Deep Purple (I tried listening to it just now, too, but had to stop), and I had a brother (I still do, somewhere in the world) who’s early love of jazz influenced me. But before Billie Holiday entered my life it was listening to KJR out of Seattle, with its iconic DJ, Pat O’Day, that swooned me… The Five Satins’ In the Still of the Night or Sixteen Candles by the Crests. Chuck Berry’s asking Maybellene why she couldn’t be true, or one of the two great Fatses - Domino, this time - singing about whippoorwills calling when evening was nigh.
I am writing this now, however, not so much out of nostalgia, though that is a draw for me, as to make the point that though, in last week’s Substack essay, I carried on about my literary forgetfulness, all of the above-named songs plus a great many more, whether delivered by the transcendent Ms. Holiday or some one-hit-wonder like Phil Phillips, whether their lyrics were inane - Do you remember when we met? That’s the day I knew you were my pet - or haunting and harrowing - Southern trees bear a strange fruit, blood on the leaves and blood at the root - I had, and still do have, little trouble remembering. I hear the tune, and whammo, the lyrics are there, and I am in a heaven of my own, blue or not.
I have read that with Alzheimer’s disease patients’ musical memories are often spared, and I once saw a demented man on a television documentary - gone to his family in every other way - climb onstage to effortlessly complete the complex harmonic ritual of singing Down By the Old Mill Stream in rounds, with a group to which he once belonged.
It was a splendid moment, but I don’t believe, as some do, that such things happen entirely because music resides in areas of the brain where there are fewer neurological misfirings.
Rather, I believe music to be the most profound, often the most beautiful, and therefore the greatest of the arts; that whether dealing with the songs of any cultural moment - jazz, folk music, or the ineffable genius of Bach or Thelonious Monk - music speaks to us, not in words we can forget, but in a spiritual, universal, precognition way. And therefore it is forever free of dementia’s talons.
And so I try to hitch my wagon to music’s star each morning, letting it have its way with me.
Just now I happen to have turned from Easy Living to Glenn Gould playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations - his slow version, not his fast one. But over the last couple of weeks, whether proofreading my soon-to-be-released The Griever’s Group, or rewriting, for the umpteenth time, a book of mine called, The Hotel Shalom, here is what has beckoned, saying, “Come, let me be your guide.”
Bags and Trane (Milt Jackson and John Coltrane)
Blue Monk (Thelonious Monk)
Scarlatti Sonatas (Racha Arodaky)
Mozart Rondo in D major (Mitsuko Uchida)
Easy Living (Paul Desmond)
Beethoven Sonatas for Piano and Violin (Robert Casadesus and Zino Francescatti)
My Funny Valentine (Miles Davis)
Satie for Two (Peter Kraus and Mark Bird)
Desafinado (Charlie Byrd)
The Bach Cello Suites (Pablo Casals)
You will note a proclivity for two particular genres, and that there is nothing at all with lyrics.
That is because, in the first instance I am hoping that the deep dive of jazz syncopations and improvisation and the metric discipline of classical composition will provide my writing with an ineffability of its own; and in the second instance, because I worry that any sort of lyric might drop down into my sentences, spider-like, and steal the show.
Also, of course,“Are the stars out tonight, I don’t know if it’s cloudy or bright,” might whisk me back to those days of KJR and Pat O’Day, and I would simply stop writing and sing along.
“My love must be a kind of blind love, I can’t see anyone but you,” after all, is a pretty good line.
It’s easy to live when you’re in love.
What really wafts me (or rather dumps me) back are the never-to-be-forgotten lyrics: "KJR, Seattle, channel ninety-five. The station with the hapPY difference." You're right. Lyrics screw up writing.