ABUSE YOUR ILLUSION: Rather than bringing Billie Holiday up to date, the remixes make her feel farther away. |
On the new Billie Holiday: Remixed and Reimagined (Columbia/Legacy), the diva’s voice flits and twitters among hissing, lumbering trip-hop beats, overlaid modern trumpet, guitar, and organ riffs, and the swelling synths and four-square bass-drum thump and hi-hat afterbeat of disco. Her vocal phrases are cut up, sampled, and sequenced. She’s made to repeat title phrases like “more than you know” over and over. Or she’ll fade down to the repeated echo of a single word: “know . . . know . . . know.” In these vocal snippets, she’s a reanimated corpse, a robot responding to the manipulations of that man behind the curtain. Sometimes her vocal is reduced to a fraction of a syllable — a note that the producer happens to like. She’s sprinkled like fairy dust among the beats.
It’s not that I think Billie Holiday: Remixed and Reimagined is some kind of unforgivable desecration. In fact, I find a lot of it rather pleasant. “Spreadin’ Rhythm Around (Lady Bug vs. Lady Day RR Remix)” concocts a hubbub of handclaps, newly recorded acoustic piano riffs, Lady Bug’s raps, and fractions of Tom Mace’s original clarinet and Richard Clarke’s muted trumpet that brings present and past together in an after-hours club of the imagination. And “Travelin’ Alone” uses Lester Young’s loping, descending tenor-sax riff as a mantra, the piece clacking along on beats like a train down the track — Lady Day alone, on the train to the next gig, dreaming to herself. The Billie Holiday–reissue business feeds our nostalgia for a time we never knew. At its best, Remixed and Reimagined is about nostalgia — Billie’s tinny voice emerging in the din of modern beats as if out of an old radio.
No, what was disheartening about hearing the Billie remix was that it methodically dismantled my last cherished jazz fantasy. For me, part of the whole aura of Billie Holiday has to do with her being in the same room at the same time with Mace, Clarke, Lester Young, Buck Clayton, Jo Jones, and Teddy Wilson. Yes, jazz production has changed just like everything else — and I even like some remixes. Verve did some good ones a few years ago, and Nina Simone — recording 30 years after Billie — fit in well on her own Remixed and Reimagined volume last year, her rock-era productions comporting with the producers’ retro stylings. And the current Miles Davis remix EP Evolution of the Groove (Columbia/Legacy) is in keeping with the Master’s late electric experiments.
But sometimes I just get sick of hearing everything turned into “information” and “signifiers” (“OH! brushes on a snare drum! jazz!”) and would at least like the illusion of a documented performance, of musicians responding to one another in real time. The great, transcendent Billie Holiday — now just another postmodern experience. Fuck.
Whatever “live” recording remains in the music business, most of it is probably done by jazz and classical musicians. Individual instrumental or vocal performances might be edited from one version to another, but those bits are drawn from separate takes that were recorded with the entire ensemble — overdubs are frowned upon. In jazz — and in classical music, too — time is flexible. It’s always rubato. We listen to the Busch String Quartet or the Miles Davis Quintet because of the way they play together, the way they respond to one another in the moment. When Clint Eastwood filmed his Charlie Parker bio, Bird, Parker’s widow, Chan, was said to be furious that Eastwood had re-recorded the rhythm section to give it more presence. It didn’t matter that the new rhythm section was re-creating that music as faithfully as possible — the music, she said, wasn’t about Bird’s solos with an interchangeable backdrop but about the way he responded to and related with those particular musicians.
Of course, many “live” jazz recordings are as much an illusion as pop concert records. Most of Duke Ellington’s famous 1956 live-at-Newport session was originally released in a form that had been re-recorded in the studio. And Miles was editing solo sections from one performance to another as far back as the ’50s. But in Miles’s marathon recordings for Prestige (in which the band had to lay down six albums’ worth of material in three days to fulfill his contract obligation and move on to the greener pastures of Columbia Records), he tried to simulate a live club date by leaving in studio chatter. Granted, his hoarse exchanges with the engineer aren’t typical of clubs, but the effect was the same: they create the sense of an experience unfolding in real time. (You can hear some of that chatter on Evolution of the Groove.) Charles Mingus went so far as to re-create his admonishments to an audience in order to simulate a live show (“No applause, no cash registers ringing, etcetera”). The result was comically transparent.
