Word: strayhorn
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 306 pages; $27.50), David Hajdu suggests why someone with such talent would settle for such anonymity. Strayhorn was homosexual; in that era the only way he could live an openly gay life was to keep out of the public eye. Hajdu gives Strayhorn his belated due as a distinct musical voice and an engaging, if conflicted, personality. Strayhorn's taste and wit, his relentless drinking, his lovers, his activism in Harlem cultural life and the civil rights movement, his generosity--all are sensitively evoked. "He was just everything that...
...Train and Satin Doll and of orchestral suites like Such Sweet Thunder was Duke Ellington. But most people are wrong. The composer, or in many cases the co-composer, of those and dozens of other hallmarks of the Ellington sound was a dapper, diminutive musicians' musician named Billy Strayhorn. From 1938 until his death of cancer in 1967, Strayhorn was Ellington's artistic alter ego--bolstered and publicly praised by the Duke but working always in his shadow, less an employee than a member of his extended household...
...approximately like a jazz pianist on acid. He performs with the standard format of a jazz combo: piano, bass, drums, and a hornman, in this case, soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy. The group records several versions of tunes from the standard jazz repertoire. Hearing Taylor perform the Duke Ellington-Billy Strayhorn composition "Johnny Come Lately" has almost the shock value that hearing Jimi Hendrix's version of "The Star Spangled Banner" must have had ten years later. The familiar jazzman's repertoire turns into a nightmare version of itself on Taylor's earliest recordings...
Despite those feelings, there's nothing solemn about Horne's "prayer." The album begins playfully with Maybe, a Strayhorn rarity written for Horne, and she gives it an easy swing that belies its hard-won wisdom ("Love is a shoestring/ Any way you tie it, it may become undone ...") Next comes Something to Live For, the great Strayhorn-Ellington ballad about having it all without having love, which Horne suffuses with trembling vulnerability. She's raucous and tough on another worldly Strayhorn number, Love Like This Can't Last. And with beautiful enunciation, she finds the quiet essence of Strayhorn...
Then George Wein, director of the JVC Jazz Festival in New York City, asked Horne to do a Strayhorn evening, and she agreed. "I thought, 'Well, Billy was my great friend,' and I've only had about four friends because I don't trust anybody. It's probably because as a child I got farmed out a lot, all over the South." After weeks of anxious rehearsals, Horne hit the stage of Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center last year and received a standing ovation. Prodded by a record producer, she returned to the studio...