Lover man
Lover Man (Oh, Where Can You Be?) (Often simply Lover Man ) is a pop song that Jimmy Davis and Ram Ramirez wrote in 1941 to a text by Jimmy Sherman . The song was written for Billie Holiday and within a few years became a popular jazz standard .
Features of the song
The song is written in the song form AABA. The scope of the ballad is limited to a ninth . Although the song is not blues , there are hidden blue notes in the melody, which has neither a major nor a minor characteristic , for example in bars 5, 12 and 21. The final chord at the end remains fuzzy: the sixth chord in F- Dur keeps the song "in suspension" and produces "a happy ending that may be just an illusion ." Alec Wilder pointed out that the song is curiously reminiscent of a slow version of Gershwin's Fascinating Rhythm .
Sherman's text was "tailor-made" for Billie Holiday: a lonely woman who could never taste the true delights of love longs for the great unknown lover, the "savior from her sad existence."
First recording
If you believe the portrayal in Billie Holidays' autobiography Lady Sings the Blues , then mainly Jimmy Davis wrote the song, who at that time was already drafted into military service and never returned from Europe. Holiday could not record the song immediately because of the recording ban , but only on October 4, 1944. With Milt Gabler she negotiated that she recorded the song with string accompaniment , with Toots Camarata and his orchestra ( Decca 23391). When she walked into the recording studio and saw the orchestra playing the strings, she was so overwhelmed that she went out again before she could start recording. The song hit the US charts in the spring of 1945 (at number 16), but only stayed there for a week. In the R&B charts, the Lover Man came in at number 5./bio/ In 1989 the original version of the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame .
Further impact history
In December 1944, Eddie Heywood , Holiday's longtime companion, presented a first cover version with his sextet . Sarah Vaughan covered the song in 1945 and made her breakthrough with her version, to which Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker contributed. Vaughan recorded the song twice more; "The version from 1945 captivates with soulful warmth, so in 1954 and above all in 1963 a greater sovereignty of the musical conception and an almost breathtaking technical perfection are added."
Charlie Parker played an instrumental version of the ballad on July 29, 1946 ; it was "one of the most tragic recordings in jazz history ." He was on rehab and had a nervous breakdown during the session . Parker started too late in his solo on Lover Man , but that doesn't soften its “greatness” - his “emotional truthfulness”. According to Siegfried Schmidt-Joos , Parker “stumbled through the harmony ” of the piece. "The beginning of every phrase in the game is exciting and charged with tension, and in the next bar the tense, brilliant spark extinguished in a gliding, falling, letting go."
Other important recordings are from JJ Johnson (1953), Ray Bryant (1958), Jeanne Lee (with Ran Blake , 1961), Sonny Rollins (with Coleman Hawkins , 1963) and Ella Fitzgerald (1966). Marcus A. Woelfle also refers to Inge Brandenburg's recording from 1960 (with Helmut Brandt ), which made her “a legend”.
Use in film
Lover Man has been used in feature films several times:
- Lady Sings the Blues (1972, performed by Diana Ross )
- Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday (1991, interpreted by Billie Holiday)
- Little Voice (1998, performed by Billie Holiday)
literature
- Hans-Jürgen Schaal (Ed.): Jazz standards. The encyclopedia. 3rd, revised edition. Bärenreiter, Kassel u. a. 2004, ISBN 3-7618-1414-3 .