jazz heroes: billie holiday, ella fitzgerald, nat king cole

Jul 18 movies: Jazz Heroes: Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole. Not actually a movie, this was a TV series they were running on Ovation. We recorded a bunch and have watched these three so far.

Of the three, the Ella Fitzgerald special was the least enjoyable. First of all it was only a half hour, so there just wasn't enough time to get into any depth about anything. And what time they had was wasted on interviews with modern singers describing Ella's style and then singing in, I presume, what they considered to be Ella's style. Gee, it would have been nice if they'd played Ella herself singing. What a concept! When they did use clips of Ella's singing, they were always abbreviated and sometimes not appropriate for the story they were telling -- for instance when they said she had started out working with Chick Webb in the mid 30s, they played a clip of her singing much later. The arrangement and her singing were totally different from what she did with Webb. By the time the narrator repeated the old myth that Louis Armstrong invented scat singing, I was done with this program.

The Billie Holiday one was better because the interview subjects were people who had known Holiday. I especially enjoyed Carmen McRae who had been friends with Holiday. She told a hilarious story about how Holiday could drink her under the table any night of the week. And how McRae's birthday was the day after Holiday's, and every year she would spend Holiday's birthday drinking all night, and then miss her own birthday because she spent the whole day hung over from Holiday's celebration. A great story whether it's true or not.

All the interviews in the Nat King Cole show were with family members. As a result it was a very flattering, gentle look at Cole. Nothing at all about difficulties he'd had to overcome or problems in his life or career. Not really that much detail about his career now that I think about it. For instance they never even said the names of the other members of the King Cole Trio. Still it was nice to see his family talk about him, especially one of his brothers. At first I was surprised that any of his siblings was still alive, then I realized the interview was probably from the 80s. The best part about the Cole special was that they played not clips, but entire songs. I really appreciated that.