"I'd Gladly Surrender"

A Night at the Vanguard with Esperanza Spalding and Fred Hersch

Last night, I went to the Village Vanguard to see Fred Hersch and Esperanza Spalding, and, apart from stellar musicianship, I didn’t know what to expect.  The last time I saw those two, Spalding was playing bass and didn’t sing.  This time she was singing without the bass, something I had never seen her do.  Spalding had recently finished writing an opera with Wayne Shorter, a giant who will turn 90 this year.  Spalding has won five Grammys, and recently walked out on a Harvard gig because she plans to do her own thing her way and build her own musical utopia.  She is a natural comedian and recounter, but she also demands to be taken very seriously.  There have been a few upright bassist/vocalists—Slam Stewart and others—but no one took it as far as she has.  She’s five-six—a few inches shorter than the instrument she masters. 

But there was no bass in the room.  What was going to happen?  Would it be new originals?  A song cycle?  Hersch swam in a few modulations.  It was exquisite.  It could have been anything.  Spalding was sitting on a stool.  Billie Holiday sang to that room before losing her cabaret card.  Anything could have happened.  But everything did. 

My heart is sad and lonely
For you I sigh, for you dear only
Why haven't you seen it?
I'm all for you, body and soul

This is the song I haven’t been able to get to the bottom of since I was 15.  I heard Herbie Hancock and Thelonious Monk play it, then later heard Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan sing it.  Coltrane found the groove that was appropriated by so many others.  I learned to play that, too, but there’s playing it and then there’s taking it all the way down.  And then doing that in a way that would sound beautiful. “Body and Soul.” It was something to aspire to.

Spalding has become iconic--the first jazz artist to win a Best New Artist Grammy, before winning four others.  She accompanied President Obama to Stockholm and sang a song commemorating his Nobel Peace Prize.  She is a luminary.  Yet there is an intimacy in the Vanguard.   We are all human beings coming in from the cold and seeking succor.  When I was standing in the line, I chatted with a couple who were around my parents’ age.  We talked about who they saw at the Vanguard, but also The Jazz Gallery, The Five Spot, Bradley’s.  We talked about all the greats who were gone.  They had their walkers and made their way downstairs.  The music was still in the present tense.

“Body and Soul” was first popularized by Louis Armstrong, then Coleman Hawkins, and then the list is endless.  An entire generation learned of it—including my students--when Amy Winehouse, in her final filmed performance, sang it with Tony Bennett shortly before she died at 27.  Bennett—who knew Billie Holiday--said he knew she wasn’t going to make it.   

I spend my days in longing
And wondering why it's me you're wronging
I tell you I mean it
I'm all for, you body and soul

This song starts after dignity crumbles.  I’m wondering why it’s me you’re wronging.  It is desperate.  And yet it has an integrity in its elegance.  It is way down there.  Spalding has all the major “Body and Soul” performances in her head, in her muscle memory.  And she has no bass in front of her.  She is there on a stool with just her voice to tell the story.  It’s a heartbreaker.  Heartbreak is the great leveler. It could be Hank Williams singing “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” or your favorite baritone singing Schubert’s Die Winterreise.  It was already cold out there.  Esperanza was warming us up.  Every time a new verse came, Spalding walked in like the own the place, and she did that, too.

My life a hell you're making
You know I'm yours for just the taking
I'd gladly surrender myself to you, body and soul

Billie Holiday changed it from “my life a wreck you’re making,” and she meant every word.  Spalding leaned on that one.  It’s not a wreck—it’s hell.  “My life a hell you’re making.”  She spent the rest of the night giving improvised monologues inside every song.  They all had me laughing and had me thinking.  Spalding doesn’t need Harvard.  She doesn’t need anything.  She’s been raising money to create her own musical utopia, on her terms.   Certainly not anyone else’s.

And yet there was that voice, which sounded like a horn.  And it was about living through hell and making it sound like paradise.  There were times, even with my flawed technique, that I thought I could get to the body and soul of “Body and Soul.”  I’ve probably played it thousands of times, and the best were when I was getting a feeling across without trying to impress.  Tom Waits said you don’t have to have to be a murderer to write a murder mystery.  You don’t have to actually be all the way down to get to “Body and Soul.”  No one really knows what is going on in there.  But we do know what it means to have given up all we have.  Why can’t you see it? 

“Body and Soul” was written by four people—music byJohnny Green, lyrics by Edward Heyman, Robert Sour and Frank Eyton—for a British musical revue in 1930, and one thing led to another before it made it to Louis Armstrong and Coleman Hawkins, all the way to Amy Winehouse and an astonishing night with Esperanza Spalding and Fred Hersch.  You could spend an entire life feeling it.  We gave it our all, when we thought there was justice in this world. 

Spalding recorded the song in Spanish in 2008 with beauty that sounded effortless, though her bass playing already had the weight of the world.  When Splading sang “Like Someone in Love” last night—by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke—there was one line that she couldn’t get past.

Lately I seem to walk
as though I have wings,
bump into things like someone in love.
Each time I look at you
I'm limp as a glove,
and feeling like someone in love.

Limp as a glove?  She didn’t think do.  She said falling in love was more like psychosis.  But she played around with this—the lyrics as writ and life as she knew it.  And she repeated the line until it would surrender to her will.

“Body and Soul” will never end, because we know that giving it our all is something we will feel compelled to do as long as we are here.  We walk these streets and make it as far as we can.  We hope we know what it is to love and be loved in return.  We hope we are appreciated by this ridiculous and beautiful world when we are in it, but even if we are, we are just passing through.  We give, we go down as deep as we can, we make it something sublime if we really have it in us, and the song of sorrow goes on without us.  We are in line at the Vanguard on a cold night, standing right where John Coltrane posed for an album cover. We are still expecting something, we give it all and we expect to get it all back.  “I’d gladly surrender,” we are told, though there is nothing glad about it.  “Body and Soul” is a document that can always be amended. The version that suits your misery may not have been performed yet. Your version of “Body and Soul” is still waiting to happen, and maybe you are the one to do it. There is always another rung. My life a hell you’re making. Many “Body and Soul”s ago, maybe you thought you hit rock bottom. “Body and Soul” hath no bottom. Esperanza is Spanish for hope, but if you’re doing “Body and Soul” justice, you check it with your coat. You know I’m yours just for the taking. It is a dream that hath no bottom, endless night, an eternal art of losing. You can always lose a little more.