An Evening With Eddie Heywood And Billie Holiday

Lover Man

An Evening With Eddie Heywood And Billie Holiday
Cover Photo: Chuck Stewart
Commodore FL 30001
1959

Personnel:
Eddie Heywood- Piano
Doc Cheatham - Trumpet
Lem Davis - Alto Saxophone
Vic Dickenson - Trombone
Al Lucas & John Simmons - Bass
Jack Parker & Big Sid Catlett

From the back cover: This further restoration of Jazz from the Commodore catalogue combines eight performances by an Eddie Heywood combo with four more or the best Billie Holidays ever made. (Another twelve are now available on Commodore FL 30,008)

The Heywood band was working at Cafe Society Downtown when these sessions were made. Eddie had been born in Atlanta, Georgia, December 4, 1915. His father was a prominent pianist and leader. Garvin Bushell, a charter member of the Fletcher Henderson band, describes the senior Heywood as "the greatest pianist of his day in that area. And they used to tell me young Eddie played like his father. The father was considered quite modern for his time."

Eddie studied with his father, and had made a professional appearance by the time he was five. He became known on the jazz scene through his work with Benny Carter in 1939 - 40, and then he played rooms like The Village Vanguard in New York. His record of Begin The Beguine – contained in this album – made him into a pop music personality of a kind in the next few years, but he had to stop playing between 1947 and 1951 because of partial paralysis on his hands. He's worked the club circuit in recent years. Once again, through an even more commercial recording, Canadian Sunset, Eddie's career has been reinvigorated in the past couple of years.

On these 1944 sessions, Eddie did all the writing, and by and large, the band was intended to complement him as the primary soloist. As a soloist, Eddie was most noted, Doc Cheatham recalls, for his left hand, for the fact that his bass lines were usually very skillful and inventive. Dic himself is a trumpet player of consistent taste who has never received much of the recognition due him. In recent years, he has been mostly working with Machete and on occasion with the Wilbur DeParis and with which he traveled to Africa on a State Department-sponsored tour in 1957, Doc's work is characterized by clarity and economy – and a singing line.

Vic Dickenson is thoroughly unique – a trombonist with wit, warmth and "shaggy dog" tone (as one of the younger players put it) who is always personal and yet can fit easily into nearly any kind of band from Dixieland to at least early modern. His uniqueness is in his conception which communicates a wry, perceptive spirit that has known scuffling but hasn't let the struggle embitter or enervate him. Lem Davis, an alto player who could and should have become more prominent, played as Doc remembers, "with more subtle harmonic sense than most of us had then and with much delicacy. He was a little ahead of the time. So was Jack Parker, the drummer." Bassist Al Lucas was a familiar participant in the New York jazz scene of the forties, and more recently, worked for a time with Teddy Wilson.

Begin The Beguine surprised everybody that year. Comodore had had a "hit" of some proportions in Billie Holiday's Fine And Mellow in 1939, but Heywood's Begin The Beguine was something else. Jack Crystal, a vital sustaining force at Commodore for many years, remembers bringing one of the first copies of the record to the widely listened to ABC network show Alan Kent and Ginger Johnson handled late at night during that era. "I knew something was going to happen with the record," says Jack, "when calls began to come in from network personnel all over the country." It also, as I remember, started a lot of imitations.

The four Billie Holiday performances are as important as the previous dozen already reissued. Of that first twelve (Commodore FL 30,008), Glenn Coulter wrote in The Jazz Review: "... it would be fruitless to invent fresh ways of commending performances which Commodore rightly calls classic... A jazz collection without these performances would be a poor things indeed."

Coulter, who has written more illuminatively about Billie's style then anyone else, also said in that review: "Billie's superiority... has always rested in transcending her materials: hacking off melodic excess, and attacking the words with, alternately, deeper conviction and greater contempt. The ambiguity is, in her best performances, elusive and unpredictable, gives even rather foolish songs a startling resemblance to real existence, and, since the process is just as musical as it is verbal and operates like opposing mirrors, results in fascination rather than monotony... Billie Holiday's desire to phrase like a horn, not just to sing, enhances words as well as music. It is a vocal approximation of th instrumentalists bowing or plucking or whatever it is, and stifling the voice's natural vibrato in favor of one that is rare and eccentrically placed. These characteristic of her style mean that each syllable seems unnaturally distinct, as if each were a stone plopped into a pool of still water..."

Miles Davis talks about her rhythm: "She sings way behind the beat and then she brings it up – hitting the right on the beat. You can play behind the beat, but every once in a while you have to cut into the rhythm section on the beat and that keeps everybody together... What I like about Billie is that she sings it just the way she hears it..."

Billie talked about the first jazz she heard during a conversation a few months ago. In describing it, she also verbalized how her own singing effects those of us who feel she has always been – and still is – nonpareil. She was talking about Louis Armstrong's horn: " He didn't say any words but somehow it just moved me so. It sounded so sad and so sweet all at the same time. It sounded like he was making love to me. That's how I wanted to sing." – Nat Hentoff, Co-Editor, The Jazz Review

Begin The Beguine
Embraceable You (Holiday)
Carry Me Back To Old Virginia
Save Your Sorrow
I Love My Man (Holiday)
I Can't Believe That You're In Love With Me
I Cover The Waterfront
As Time Goes By (Holiday)
Lover Man
Love Me Or Leave Me
I'm Yours (Holiday)
Blue You