I will be writing a column on Length & Time in music, in each presenting an album and its strategies that pertain to addressing Length & Time.
On Blue Note Records’s website, José James tells us that he decided to release an own album of Billie Holiday’s songs, Yesterday I Had The Blues, because he’d loved her music while living at his childhood home and also ‘during a difficult period of my adolescence.’ In Holiday’s music, he heard ‘grand, warm, unique.’ He re-produces us “grand, warm, unique” on Yesterday I Had The Blues.
The title of the album begins with the word ‘yesterday,’ and not ‘today’ despite James’s singing. It is a title that can only, at first, suggest that he is distancing himself from the blues and today, celebrating an achievement. In “God Bless The Child,” however, he sounds like he, personally, has the blues today. Like Holiday, he sings us sentiment slowly, asking us to mind along.
The song’s band also has the blues; a sultry blues. It happens over and over again, that we hear sultry blues to ‘grand, warm, unique’ James singing. “I Thought About You” is a pretty frank and facile love song. James sings us melancholy with heart. The piano playing accompanies James’s singing brilliantly. We not only hear a Holiday song but Holiday’s era.
“Good Morning Heartache” actually features the word ‘blues.’ James sings the song well, though without as much heart as Billie did.
To “Strange Fruit” James brings some of what the 1960’s and the 1970’s did to song: mature politicized singing. He sings us for a sonic effect that Holiday did not aim for, though for the same affect. It is the album’s best song and it reveals James’s musical ambition for the album: to propose interpretations of Holiday’s aesthetic as the singer of sad lyrics (call them blues if you like though some were not) and romantic lyrics to intimate blues playing.
The album’s title, in the end, is a tool to address his times. Yesterday I had the blues does not exclude that today I still have them; it proposes that yesterday, what we all can no longer experience, was such a way.
Length wise, these songs are on the longer side, “Lover Man” being 6:42 and perfect for individual contemplation. James seems to be legislating Billie Holiday to his time, in enough length to explore his thesis: that this blues woman could sing all sorts of songs, including pop.
Author: Adolf Alzuphar
