Lush Life – the Journey of a Song
Portrait of jazz singer Johnny Hartman by Sarah Fenwick
My name is Lush Life. I’m one of the oldest living jazz songs.
I was born to the great jazz composer and pianist, Billy Strayhorn. He wrote my notes and lyrics in 1933, when he was a teenager.
An African American teenager.
A gay African American teenager.
A gay African American teenage jazz musician living in an intolerant time.
No wonder one of my lines is ‘life is lonely again’.
Billy’s heart is imprinted on me. On every note and every word. He recorded me twice. Once in 1961 for Capitol Records ‘The Peaceful Side’ album, and again for the album named after me, ‘Lush Life, A Biography of Billy Strayhorn.’ What an honour. It was my highest note. It’s every song’s dream to be the title of an album.
When Billy sang me, he half-spoke me like a poem, feeling his way around the pitch overtones like a violinist. Twelve o’clock ‘tails and cigarettes smoked in my lower notes. The drummer’s brushes hissed a hypnotic train-like rhythm under Billy’s confident piano playing. My father knew all the tricks, expertly quickening and slowing the tempo in my opening verses. He sang my deepest, most indefinable personality trait – my jazziness, my off-centredness. His voice broke when he sang ‘all I care is to smile in spite of it.’
I miss Billy, my father, and my creator.
Over the years, I got the reputation for being capricious, even for the best jazz singers. Frank Sinatra couldn’t carry my tune, saying I was difficult enough without Nelson Riddle’s challenging arrangement.
It’s not that I didn’t want Frankie to sing me and trumpet me with his powerful tenor voice. It’s more that he headed straight at my notes instead of wooing them and giving them the lies, juice and love they needed. It wasn’t meant to be. I was cut from his 1958 album Only the Lonely.
Irony, after all, is one of my themes. As in art, so in life.
When Johnny Hartman sang me, his phrasing opened out my vowels like an oboe. His rich baritone carried me like sugar carries sweetness. In his solo, the master, John Coltrane, twirled my notes into sound butterflies fluttering over the notes of the piano. I fell in love with them both.
Strayhorn, Coltrane, Hartman and Sinatra are all dead. They live on in my recordings, as vibrant as if they’d performed me yesterday. Of late, women such as Queen Latifah sing me. I appear on her 2004 CD ‘The Dana Owens Album’. The recording was originally meant for the movie Living Out Loud with Holly Hunter and Danny DeVitoe. But it was cut. Oh well.
How does it feel to be sung by a woman? Lush. Queen Latifah’s luscious voice stretches my vowels. Her voice is higher than my father’s, and gentler. But like my father, her sentiments flow easily around my lyrics – around the familiar ground of broken hearts and dreams drowned long ago in an ocean of cocktails.
Like I always say, a week in Paris will ease the bite of it.