Body and Soul: Hawk Reversions Himself

Body and Soul Coleman Hawkins

Just because he dropped the reference version, doesn't mean the Hawk would leave the tune alone. Rather he deviled and re-deviled it. we're pretty sure his primary point is that he can do it again and not be the same. The desperate exchange of body for soul, the Faustian heartbreak in the song, is easy to lose when this is the approach. Therefore, it is interesting how he brings the heartbreak back into all three versions. Lissen for it.

• Coleman Hawkins with Billy Byers and His Orchestra, "Body and Soul." We're not sure Hawk gentles himself into this smoothjazz ensemble, but then maybe that's the point. By the end, its his voice alone, not even against the orchestra.
• Coleman Hawkins, "Picasso." Here all w/ both accompaniment and melody dropped, Hawk takes on blues and the abstract truth. We believe this bullet ranks w/ Armstrong/Hines "Weather Bird" as an intellectual exercise, even if it lacks the zing the two duelists put into their piece. It is, of course, about the breakdown that occurs when you are alone. That's the point. It's after the tragic ending of the reference version, "an echo of a tale that's been told."

Body and Soul: Art Tatum

When we reconcile the song to the solo, we find more confusion in the pianoed versions of B&S than either the vocalized or tenorized. It may be that Hawk's footprint is so large he leaves room for nothing but gravity, but we don't think so. It may just be that the too many piano renditions come at the song with a lightfingered musical approach, which isn't bad initself, but something that leaves at least this lissener wondering where the song's torch went.

One exception to this rule the Art Tatum solo version that he dropped in that legendary two day blast for Norman Granz in the early 50s that produced 8 volumes of the good sh*t.

His take on B&S begins lagging, teasing sadness from the melody. Even as Tatum's imagination takes over the song, he resists the temptation to pep it up, as he does earlier in the disc (we gots no session records at our grasp, so we can't tell whether it really comes first) with his take on "Love for Sale." It's in the second chorus, though, when he proves how subtly he conceives of the song. There he interpolates a sweet passage from "Nobody Knows...," making the bluesy connection from pain to salvation. Which is the song's all about it.

Here you go:

• Art Tatum, "Body and Soul," Solo Masterpieces Volume 1.

Body and Soul: Vocal Approaches/Lyrics

By now, we've laid out one of those pictures with two sides.* On one side we have "Body and Soul" the framework for heroic solo instrumentalism.† On the other, we introduced a foundational post, where the song stands up in its earliest versions as a singer's tune.‡

The singers remind us that it's a song w/ lyrics, not just Johnny Green's work, a torchy melody wrapped around some tough chord changes that have lured the mighty tenors of the 20th c. into a titanic struggle with one another.

First, a couple of bullets:

• Frank Sinatra, "Body and Soul" (1947). Another reference version. Blue-eyed soul worth knowing by heart.
• Louis Armstrong and His New Sebastian Club Seranaders, "Body and Soul" (1930). We already cited this masterpiece as the beginning of the jazz versions of the song. Listen for Lionel Hampton on the vibes.
  
• Sarah Vaughan, "Body and Soul" (1954). From the extraordinary slab, Swingin' Easy, which sports John Malachi on piano, Joe Benjamin on bass, and Roy Haynes brushing out an elegant and gentle groove on drums.
• Billie Holiday, "Body and Soul" (1940). Includes some soulful bars at the intro and the break by Roy Eldridge, as well as a solid combo composed of Jimmy Powell and Carl Frye alto sax, Kermit Scott tenor sax, Sonny White piano, Lawrence Lucie guitar, John Williams bass, and Harold "Doc" West drums.

Today, though, the words of Edward Heyman, Robert Sour and Frank Eyton draw us. If we discard the bad latinate grammar ("for you I sigh" or "my life a wreck you're making"), the song starts our sad and gets sadder. Rejected, the singer must offer more and more of themselves to prove their devotion. Loss yields surrender, and surrender escalates with more loss. It's excruciating. Each of the first three versions cited above turn on the third verse:

My life a wreck you’re making.
You know I’m yours for just the taking.
I’d gladly surrender
Myself to you body and soul.

Sinatra's version just plays the loser's version straight. Armstrong's ends with the heartbreaking grunt. Sassy's grows torchier with every verse.

But no one suffers in song like Billie Holiday. For all others, "Body and Soul" is a about giving up it up after it won't matter. Lady takes a sad song, flips one word -- "wreck" goes to "hell" without the author's permission -- in the first line of the third verse, and makes it one of spiritual loss.

My life a hell you’re making
You know I’m yours for just the takin’
I’d gladly surrender
Myself to you, body and soul

She's giving up her soul, not her body. In other versions it the other way around. And where others foreshorten the song, lyrically, she drags out Heyman, Sour and Green for all its worth:

What lies before me?
A future that’s stormy
A winter that’s gray and cold

Unless there’s magic
The end will be tragic
And echo a tale that’s been told
So often

With her recast version, we can almost re-read the entire song, line by line, as a version of "Crossroads Blues." In the face of a stormy future (no one sings about bad the promise of bad weather better than the Lady), she begs for a spell to stave off the too familiar sad ending.

Due to this dubscience, the final verse takes on its own totally new meaning:

My life revolves about you
What earthly good am I without you?
Oh I tell you I mean it
I’m all for you, body and soul

Earthly good? None. The tossed away remains of this Faustian bargain have no heaven, only hell. All for you, body and soul.

* Maybe it's a 7" rekkid, which the people have mislabled a "single" even though it's got an A side and a B side.
† Stop here and here.
‡ Stop here.

Body and Soul: Prehawk

We've put a tied up a coupla knots in this B&S thread already. Let's now get to the start.

"Body and Soul" is a pop tune, from back in the day when pop tunes came from musical theater. It was a feature song in Three's a Crowd. The versionologist to takes it from the stage, samples it, makes it new by putting it into the tradition. Again and again. That's how we begin.

To this end, let's load a crowd of bullets in the clip from 1930. It's a straightforward case:

• Ruth Etting, "Body and Soul." Etting was not above living the blues. Check that portion of her bio where her husband shoots her lover and gets a year upstate.
• Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra, "Body and Soul." The vocal is by Whiteman's trombone player, Jack Fulton. No need to tell you that Whiteman was the Elvis or Eminem of his day, grinding hits that more proper people wanted curbed 'cause they were creating bad habits among the youth. But that's all in the tradition, too.
• Louis Armstrong* and His Orchestra, "Body and Soul." Odd man out. Here's where the story begins.

J Y E A H

* We have so much things to say about the man. We'll be back at it. He basically made the 20th century up from mud and straw in the streets. We're still living under that spell.

Body and Soul -- Reference Version

A few days ago we mapped up a project to go through our stacks of "Body and Soul." We loaded a clip of 38 bullets and began walking the streets of the Diamond, our ear to the ground. At that moment, this project, like every one, became bigger just as we began. We look up. We look down. We get case of the vertigo. For us this means we gotta keep on, even tho the work is so high we can't get over it, and so low we can't get under it. Isn't that the way it is, all the time and any way you choose it. You can find it. You just can't lose it.

So let's lay down the next mark, one that will hold our gaze as we listen to e/thing else.

• Coleman Hawkins, "Body and Soul."
  

Constant readers will predict that when we first spun this hit up, it was from the Smithsonian text book. We started listening to it 37 years after it hit the jukebox, and we been listening to it for 33 years. That makes it one of the foundation stones, at least in our pile.

We put these marks down on the first of two days of the martyrs (w/ the other coming in February). As we keep marking this thread up, we'll be putting down what we learn from studying the versions. This versionology is an occult science.

Here, tho, is all we can say today: there is something in the spell cast by a foundation stone. It's not the first. It's not the last. It's the one that holds other to the building. We think that on a day like today, Martyr's Day, this is something to think on. Body and soul.


P E A C E