Billie Holiday: "Fine and Mellow"

Your watching "The Sound of Jazz," which aired on CBS television on Sunday, December 8, 1957, one of the few times that network television has acknowledged jazz.

Billie was accompanied by the Mal Waldron All-Stars: Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, and Ben Webster (tenor saxes); Gerry Mulligan (baritone sax); Roy Eldridge, Doc Cheatham (trumpets); Vic Dickenson (trombone); Mal Waldron (piano); Jim Atlas (bass); Danny Barker (guitar); and Jo Jones (drums). Watch how Billy beams when Lester Young solos!

This video reminds me of a good friend of mine whom I knew in Chicago during the 1970s and 1980s: M.W. Newman. He was simply "Bill" to his friends, and he had many. Bill was editor of Panorama, the Chicago Daily News Saturday Magazine. He liked an article about jazz I submitted and invited me to join him for lunch at the Chicago Press Club.

Bill resembled his brother, Edwin, who was much better known because of his 35-year career as a journalist for NBC television. Both of them graduated from the Unversity of Wisconsin and became distinguished journalists.

Thanks to Bill, I contributed a number of articles to Panorama. When the Chicago Daily News folded in 1978, Bill and many of his Daily News colleagues went to work for the Chicago Sun-Times. I then wrote freelance articles for the Sun-Times.

Bill told me how much he enjoyed hearing Billie Holiday sing in person in New York City in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He said she always mesmerized the men in her audiences. "She was the best," Bill said, "the best."

And so was Bill Newman, who died in October 2001 at the age of 84.

The late Chicago newspaper columnist Mike Royko often called Bill "simply the greatest newspaper writer of his time." Mike was right.

George Spink
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