Holiday sorrow

April 7 marked the centennial of Billie Holiday’s birth. It’s an occasion that the jazz singers José James and Cassandra Wilson have celebrated with creative and sympathetic tribute albums.

James’ is Yesterday I Had the Blues: The Music of Billie Holiday (Blue Note); Wilson’s, Coming Forth by Day (Legacy). Both capture the complex and seemingly bottomless sorrow at the heart of Holiday’s most enduring performances. And by doing so with dignity (instead of, say, parasitism), they redeem the suffering to which Holiday succumbed at the age of 44.

To quote Legacy.com, Holiday’s career “was often overshadowed by personal problems.” These included addictions to alcohol, heroin, and abusive men. That the post–Jazz Age buoyancy of her first decade of recordings belied these problems only emphasizes the degree to which her last decade of recordings brought them to the fore.

Holiday’s self-destructiveness can be explained to a large extent by the abandonment, the rapes, the prostitution, and the incarceration that afflicted her youth (and maybe by the racism and the sexism that afflicted her adulthood). But her circumstances don’t explain her practically embracing victimization during the years that she was becoming, and knew that she was becoming, the greatest jazz singer ever. By all accounts, she was aware of the preciousness of the gift that she was destroying.

James and Wilson are aware of it too. Together they cover only 17 of the more than 300 songs that Holiday recorded (including four of the 10 that she wrote or co-wrote). But their albums make up in depth what they lack in breadth. And the three songs that they share—the cautiously optimistic “What a Little Moonlight Can Do,” the cautiously pessimistic “Good Morning Heartache,” the outright despairing “Strange Fruit” (about black lynchings in the Deep South)—highlight Holiday’s still-astonishing emotional range.

James’ album is, in some ways, the greater accomplishment. According to the tenets of contemporary feminism, James, as a man, should be congenitally incapable of feeling, let alone of giving voice to, a woman’s pain.

But while there is a certain androgyny to his deeper readings, James does, if ever so gently, assert his masculinity. (He drops the “man,” for instance, from the refrain of “Lover Man.”) Ultimately, his performances inhabit and illuminate the overlapping portion of the Venn diagram mapping male and female emotions.

Wilson, of course, has no gender barriers to overcome. But there’s also androgyny in her voice, the gauzy alto nature of which blends nicely with the dark, jazz-noir shadings of her eclectic accompanists, the rock-noir inclinations of her producer Nick Launay, and the psychedelic-noir inclinations of her arranger Van Dyke Parks.

Every piece breathes, but it’s the sole Wilson original “Last Song (for Lester)” that highlights the project’s ambition. Holiday, having been denied permission to sing at her friend Lester Young’s funeral, was shattered. Wilson’s conception and delivery of what Holiday would have sung is shattering as well.

Man knows not his time

The London-born jazz pianist Ralph Sharon died on March 31 at 91. He left a recorded legacy that included 19 solo albums and 16 with Tony Bennett, whom he accompanied on and off for more than 50 years and to whom he introduced “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

Sharon’s music was rivaled in class and elegance only by his reticence regarding his private life and his insistence that accompanying was not a subordinate art.

“It’s a very specialized thing,” he once said. “I don’t think the public realize too much about it, but the people who are in the business know about it—that’s the main thing.” —A.O.