Love tracks

Tony Bennett covers Billie Holiday

by Steve Vineberg

Tony Bennett's recent tributes to the artists he adores have a celebratory, open-hearted feel -- like Perfectly Frank (to Sinatra, of course) from 1992, and 1995's Here's to the Ladies, which re-creates signal tunes by a dozen and a half women singers. They're indulgent in the sweetest way; you sense he's been waiting his whole career to treat himself to these songs that have his colleagues' fingerprints all over them.

They're the most unselfconscious of tributes. Although his famous phrasing has never been more masterful, his readings never more deeply felt, on every track you can sense him smiling in wonder across the decades at the singers linked with these songs. (The tacit preface to each selection seems to be "Remember this one? Wasn't it a beauty?") And as his own voice has started to take on the trappings of age, as that toasted, husky sound that wraps itself around a song like a deliciously outsize overcoat has grown a little worn, a little tremulous, his desire to try his own versions of these tunes he loves is even more moving. An album like Here's to the Ladies or his new On Holiday (all Columbia), on which he performs 19 Billie Holiday numbers, reminds us in its quiet way that though the music may linger on, the singer doesn't get to stick around forever.

Despite the generous selection, On Holiday is a very modest album. On six of the tracks, the sole accompaniment is Ralph Sharon's piano, and even the strings on the others (arranged by Jorge Calandrelli) are fairly muted. They take a back seat to Bennett, and Bennett, as always, takes a back seat to the songs. He performs a number of my own pet Holidays, like "I Wished on the Moon," with its rueful Dorothy Parker lyric, and "Some Other Spring," "What a Little Moonlight Can Do," "Trav'lin' Light," "My Old Flame."

Bennett gives "Some Other Spring" (the only track that opens with a big, sweeping instrumental build-up) an especially expressive reading. It's nearly the album's highlight, but "Willow Weep for Me" is even more beautiful. His rendition of the great Ann Ronell ballad is as much a tribute to Sinatra's ghostly recording of it on Only the Lonely as it is to Billie Holiday's. Bennett reads the song as the private confession of a racked, exhausted soul; he strips away the luxurious masochism that's made it such a saloon favorite.

On Holiday has other selections that are even more frequently recorded than "Willow Weep for Me" -- "These Foolish Things," for instance, and "Solitude" and "Ill Wind." But Bennett always adds something of his own; you never feel you've heard these numbers once too often. On the Harold Arlen/Ted Koehler "Ill Wind," he surprises by slowing down on "When love's to blame" at the end of the bridge, then doubling up on the words "ill wind" at the outset of the final verse, dragging behind the beat and then wrestling it to the ground so he can shape the last bar into a plaintive cry. On "Crazy He Calls Me," he pulls the bridge out of the song to use it as an epigraph, underlining the reckless romanticism of the lyric: "Like the wind that shakes the bough/She moves me with a smile/The difficult I'll do right now/The impossible may take a little while."

Bennett missteps on only two of the tracks. He's really the wrong singer to cover "My Old Flame." Although he gets the nostalgia and the regretfulness in the tone (which Holiday effected with wrung notes at the ends of some of the lines), he misses the point of the song, which was written for Mae West and is about a woman recalling fondly the best lover she's ever had. Bennett cuts the honky-tonk raunch out of the ballad; the giveaway is the lyric switch (to accommodate a male singer) from "But I haven't met a gent/So magnificent or elegant" to the rather sexless "But I haven't met a gal/So magnificent, my only pal."

And in the finale, Bennett unwisely duets with Holiday herself on her best-known song, "God Bless the Child" (which she wrote with Arthur Herzog). At best, a collaboration between a living singer and a dead one shifts the focus away from both voices to the technology that makes it possible. What ends up getting accentuated is the impossible distance between the two vocalists. At worst, it's creepy -- necrophilic. Obviously Bennett intended "God Bless the Child" as a loving homage, but the album doesn't need a capstone. There's love in every track.