Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [23]
And then Chu Berry made the same mistake Sarah Vaughan was later to make with me. He suggested they do “I Got Rhythm,” just the way Sarah had suggested “I Cried for You.” Anything but that! “I Cried” was my damn meat, just like “Rhythm” was Lester’s.
He blew at least fifteen pretty choruses, none of them the same, and each one prettier than the last. When the fifteenth one was down, Chu Berry was finished, just like Sarah was finished after my eighth chorus of “Cried.”
Chu’s gang were die-hards, and they were sick. All they could say to console themselves was that Chu had a bigger tone. What the hell that meant, I’ll never know. What difference how big a tone is or how small, as long as Lester’s line was moving in that wonderful way, with those chords, changes and those notes that would positively flip you with surprise? Chu was a mature man with a great big growl. Lester was a young man. There ain’t no rule saying everybody’s got to deliver the same damn volume or tone.
But anyway, this talk about a big tone messed with Lester for months. And me too. So I said, “What the hell, Lester, don’t let them make a fool of us. We’ll get you a big horn with big fat reeds and things and no damn rubber bands around it holding you back. We’ll get us a tone.”
So every time Lester could get a dime together he’d get him some more reeds and start cutting them up all kinds of different ways. He got him a new horn, too, and thought that would end him up with a big fat growl. But his tone never got any bigger. He wasn’t meant to sound like Chu and he soon gave up trying.
Everyone’s got to be different. You can’t copy anybody and end up with anything. If you copy, it means you’re working without any real feeling. And without feeling, whatever you do amounts to nothing.
No two people on earth are alike, and it’s got to be that way in music or it isn’t music.
I never forget this wonderful old Spaniard, Pablo Casals, who played the cello once on TV. When he finished some Bach he was interviewed by some American chick. “Every time you play it, it’s different,” she gushed.
“It must be different,” said Casals. “How can it be otherwise? Nature is so. And we are nature.”
So there you are. You can’t even be like you once were yourself, let alone like somebody else.
I can’t stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession, let alone two years or ten years. If you can, then it ain’t music, it’s close-order drill or exercise or yodeling or something, not music.
Early one morning, after one of these jam sessions folded, Lester went back to Mom’s with me to get some of her early breakfast specials. He had been living at a well-known Harlem hotel, and he was almost a nervous wreck from that. A few mornings before, he had opened his dresser drawer and found an unregistered guest staring him in the face. A big dirty old rat the size of my dog was using his shirts for a pad.
He got someone to help him and they carried the dresser down to the lobby. Everybody got brooms and sticks and mops and things. They wanted to let that rat out, then corner him and leave the evidence at the desk. If he had complained to the management and didn’t have the proof by the tail, they were sure to accuse him of smoking somebody’s bushes.
So Lester and the broom brigade all came to attention, someone opened the drawer, there was a great swinging of weapons, but the damn rat slipped by all of them and got away.
That left Lester shaky enough. Then one night Hal West, the drummer who worked in a trio with him, was putting some straightener on his hair. That stuff they peddled then would burn you like crazy unless you were careful and had plenty of water to put on after. Just as Hal got it on his hair, he turned on the water faucet and nothing happened. His head was burning up, as he tried one faucet, then the other, and got nothing