Around the age of fourteen or fifteen when I began to spend every other high school lunch break on a discursion around town, scouring Borders and a plethora of secondhand record stores for CDs and other cultural bric-à-brac, my first introduction to the music of Billie Holiday came by way of Proper Records and their four-disc box sets. Whatever quibbles were to be had in the vein of rights and remuneration, these sets which sought to cover the back catalogues of old jazz, blues and country legends served as my inroad to the likes of Charlie Parker and Louis Jordan, Fats Navarro and Hank Williams and Édith Piaf.
None though received more playtime than the Billie Holiday set, especially the second disc subtitled ‘Strange Fruit’, which proffered a social history of so much of the twentieth century, yet which I cherished first and foremost for its sense of swing, as Holiday performed tracks like ‘A Sailboat in the Moonlight’, ‘Nice Work If You Can Get It’, ‘Fine and Mellow’, the title piece and ‘I Can’t Believe That You’re in Love With Me’ accompanied by Teddy Wilson, Lester Young and the Count Basie mainstays Buck Clayton, Jo Jones and Freddie Green. My favourite song was ‘You Go To My Head’ by John Frederick Coots and Haven Gillespie, with its winding music hall melody and haunting refrains, where Holiday teeters and tumbles over the course of less than three romantic and almost implausibly languid minutes, as the atmosphere shifts from spritzy zest to a hapless and world-weary stupor.
The trumpeter Jacob Wick has performed and recorded with a diverse array of artists from Claire Rousay and Katherine Young to Matana Roberts, Gerald Cleaver and Brad Henkel, yet his own musical world increasingly revolves around the burgeoning alternative scene of Mexico City. His current sextet features the drummer Gibrán Andrade, the cellist Mabe Fratti, the violinist Alina Maldonado, the bassist Saúl Ojeda and the guitarist Federico Sánchez, and has set itself the task of exploring and recuperating a distinctly personal collection of popular and lesser-known songs culled from the past hundred or so years. Those familiar with Mabe Fratti will recognise the name of Andrade and perhaps Wick’s too, as his billowing puffs and smeared trumpet fanfares left their mark on her album Sentir que no sabes earlier this year.
Wick says that his work is dedicated to and informed by queer feelings and queer politics. His last album with his sextet sought to embrace the ‘sentimentality, overt sexuality, teasing, laughter, nostalgia, deep sadness and direct emotionality’ of queerness through a set of personal jazz standards, which covered the delicious rot and notorious complexity of ‘Lush Life’ by Billy Strayhorn and the ‘Grass Roots’ of the pianist Andrew Hill plus other compositions which pulled at conventional notions of jazz in the form of the sexually fraught ‘I’m on Fire’ by Bruce Springsteen and ‘Stop the World (and Let Me Off)’ which was conceived and performed by Carl Belew then swiftly covered by Johnnie & Jack and Patsy Cline, but is perhaps best remembered today as an early hit for Waylon Jennings.
His new album Something in Your Eyes is even more eye-catching and eclectic as Wick and his ensemble draw out songs by Emmylou Harris, Alice Coltrane and Kylie Minogue before settling in on that intoxicating classic by Billie Holiday, one long last sip of sparkling burgundy brew. Over the tumbling of Andrade’s percussion and a surging drone of violin and guitar which captures a distinctive country ache, their take on ‘Rough and Rocky’ from Emmylou’s traditional turn on Blue Kentucky Girl immediately foregrounds Wick’s vocals, a kind of staccato baritone which sometimes carries the intonation of a coarser Stephin Merritt, as he barrels in his doleful and expressive monotone right into a tale of choppy heartbreak. The song reaches its climax through a tortuous tangle of brass and strings, careening into the emotional morass which defines the lyrics, its wide waters and chasms fathoms deep.
Their cover of the title track from Alice Coltrane’s third solo album, the oft-quoted ‘Ptah, the El Daoud’, is more stately and restrained as Wick’s trumpet fills in amply for the tenor saxophones of Pharoah Sanders and Joe Henderson on the original recording, while also proving redolent of Miles Davis’s tone and manner circa In a Silent Way. It sacrifices swing for something more sonorous and fragrant, sandy and even a little bit haughty or monolithic until the whinnying climax which features the same rattlestick drums and plucked strings which vibrate with the haste and limpidity of mallet percussion, making for one of the sextet’s most stirring and successful interpretations of a jazz standard to date.
Less easy to distinguish is their version of ‘Hey Lonely’, from the deluxe edition of Disco by Kylie Minogue. A bubbly dance song which verges on electropop, and seems to place the singer on an underwater stage while pressing down on the fast-forward button, Wick pulls out the submerged handclaps and hones in on a little hook from the chorus, repeating the phrase ‘My love, my heart, my sweetness and devotion’ in exultant tones over the folksy strings, bounding bass and brushed drums which provide a quickening accompaniment. As the song splinters into its constituent parts in the second half of the track, the result winds up somewhere between free jazz, flamenco and Roy Orbison, with an unusual insistence as Wick repeats the line ‘I see something in your eyes that I recognise’ over the canyon resonance of an echoing kick drum.
Finally their rendition of ‘You Go To My Head’ carries only the faintest trace of Billie Holiday’s cherished 1938 version, more queasy from the outset as Wick’s trumpet carries a semblance of the melody in the middle distance, butted out by the restless wailing of the strings. There is a sense of foreboding here which plays alongside the tipsy and carbonated quality that Holiday and her orchestra managed to conjure up way back then, and when Wick’s voice enters at the halfway point of the song between the shredded strings and lurching rhythm section, it sounds almost absurdly drowsy and rumpled, less tipsy now than totally sloshed and glazed.
In fact their take on the song bears as much comparison with Holiday’s later version, which was released in 1952 as the penultimate track on Billie Holiday Sings, then pushed up the pecking order when the eight songs were reissued in 1956 with four additional tracks under the title Solitude. On this occasion the Clef and Verve founder Norman Granz served as producer, with the pianist Oscar Peterson leading the accompaniment besides Flip Phillips on the tenor saxophone and Charlie Shavers on the trumpet, while Barney Kessel adds these warm almost flamenco-inspired licks on the guitar.
Over a much slower arrangement, Holiday’s vocals carry little of the lusty romance or headlong ardour of the earlier version as she instead toys with the words, almost as a kind of retort to the lover who seems to linger just out of grasp. The result is aloof rather than desirous or abashed. At moments Wick’s take on this particular song as well as the tenor of the entire project call to mind a similar act of recuperation and entanglement by the pianist Cory Smythe, who recently issued an album of oblique renditions for ensemble and solo piano of the Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach standard ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, which he described as ‘an object lesson in the transmutation of weather and grief into sound’.
Whatever as the screen tilts and those fizz bubbles rise to pop on the surface of the composition, Wick and his sextet seem to embrace their own stupor, finding a sense of solace inside the beige or burgundy liquor of a half-spilled cup or flute. If the original song is a metaphor for the headiness of romance, here the body is intoxicated at least as much as the soul, there is no space left for coyness, and if desire exists beyond the impulse for another ’round’ or order it is transmitted only through a pair of glassy eyes.
