12. “Yesterdays”

Billie Holiday (Commodore, 1939); Miles Davis (Blue Note, 1952); Marianne Faithfull, Strange Weather (Island, 1987); composed by Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach for the 1933 musical, Roberta

I own at least five versions of this song from a now- obscure musical where it was introduced by Irene Dunne. Although its “subject” is obvious from the title, the song is hard to parse, both emotionally and musically. The words wistfully recalling “days of wild romance and love” and oddly rhyming “youth” with “truth,” exude a steely reluctance to mourn anything, and the music follows suit. Major chords glimmer through the minor, and the harmony never quite resolves in any predictable way. The song never lands. Miles Davis’s 1952 version (recorded after he almost fired Jackie McLean for refusing to learn it) underscores this. Billie Holiday’s definitive version was recorded at the same session as “Strange Fruit” and even more jarring than the similarity of the two performances is how appropriate that similarity is. Sorrowful, sardonic, but no regrets at all. Marianne Faithfull’s version with the weltschmertz underlined by Bill Frisell’s guitar and Michael Gibbs’s string arrangement would seem to overstate the case for melancholia were it not for the physical fact that Faithfull’s voice seems to drip with an almost idealized notion of pain so visceral that it is as much a dark joke as nostalgia itself is.


Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.