[Dixielandjazz] FW: Billie Holiday reviewed

Tue Apr 5 02:47:02 PDT 2005

Dear friends,
More on Billie Holiday from that other site.
Kind regards,
Bill. 
________________________________________________________

A New Day
CDs, DVD celebrate the life and music of Billie Holiday
by Rashod D. Ollison
Baltimore Sun, April 4, 2005

We all know the lady sang the blues. And by numerous accounts,
Billie Holiday lived them, too: raped as a girl, a prostitute by age 14, an
addict most of her adult life.

If we are to believe her many biographers, the artist, to paraphrase
author Zora Neale Hurston, seemed to believe that nature had given
her a "lowdown dirty deal" and her "feelings were all hurt about
it." 
So all of that pain, all of that bitterness and sorrow dammed up in
Holiday's soul came through whenever she stepped before a microphone
to sing. A profound sense of longing crystallized in her voice.
Billie Holiday was a tragic beauty, a victim.

So the legend goes.
But there was much more to the woman born Eleanora Fagan, more
complexities to the legend whose image (unsmiling face, a gardenia
pinned to her hair) graces T-shirts and postcards today.

The best way to get to know Lady Day -- the mythical genius who was
raised in the Fells Point section of Baltimore -- is to listen
closely to her music. In stores tomorrow, two days away from what
would have been the singer's 90th birthday, is perhaps the most
expansive retrospective of the singer's work.

"The Ultimate Collection" is a beautifully packaged, multimedia set
with 42 songs that cover the artist's 20-year recording career with
various record labels. In addition to two CDs of nicely remastered
music, there's a DVD featuring film clips from the 1930s and '40s,
and TV performances from the '50s. The DVD also includes a timeline
and several audio interviews, including a revelatory one Mike
Wallace conducted with Holiday in 1956.

"My whole mission on the Billie set was to elevate her as a great
artist, not a victim," says producer Toby Byron, whose company,
Multiprises, oversaw the release of "The Ultimate Collection." "I'm
so tired of that. The reason she lives on is because the music is so
great, not because she was a drug addict. Her whole musicality
reflects America: the good and the bad, for better or worse."

Personal chaos 
During her lifetime and certainly after her death in 1959, Holiday's
genius was largely obscured by personal chaos. In the '40s, her
arrests for heroin and opium possession drew big headlines in
mainstream papers, while her recordings at the time received little
serious critical attention.

In 1956, Holiday published "Lady Sings the Blues," a mostly
fabricated autobiography that did little to change her self-
destructive image. Sixteen years later in 1972, Diana Ross garnered
an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of the gifted artist in the
movie named after the book. The film, a hit that introduced a new
generation to Holiday's music, misconstrued the artist's life even
more and further perpetuated the many myths about her.

Farah Jasmine Griffin, professor of English and comparative
literature at Columbia University, wrote a probing analysis of
Holiday's legend in the 2001 book "If You Can't Be Free, Be a
Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday."

"A lot of those myths about Billie Holiday are longstanding myths
about black women, period," Griffin says. "Those myths are that
black women artists are not smart, that their emotions rule over
intellect, that they only sing from their heart, that they're not skilled
musicians. There would be no Norah Jones if there was no Billie
Holiday. Second only to Louis Armstrong, she had the most profound
influence on American popular music."

Hers was a small, coronet [cornet]-like voice with a limited range. But with
it, Holiday revolutionized pop and jazz singing forever. She was the
first popular vocalist to benefit from the advance technology of the
microphone, which enabled her to perfect her hushed, quiet tone. She
sang behind the beat, a technique later picked up by Frank Sinatra,
who adored Holiday. She suspended time with her innate
improvisational talent, a skill that influenced Miles Davis' moody
style on the trumpet.

"Her sense of rhythm was dead on," says author and music critic
Ashley Kahn, who wrote the liner notes for "The Ultimate
Collection." "Part of the reason why she sounds so modern is that so
many singers still use her techniques to convey emotion and
intimacy."

Master sensualist 
Not only a heart-tugging interpreter of vulnerable, down-in-the-
dumps 
blues, Holiday was a master sensualist. One only needs to skip to
Track 3 on Disc 2 of "The Ultimate Collection" and listen as the
singer spins aural silk out of "You're My Thrill." Recorded in 1949
at the peak of Holiday's artistry, a few years before her voice
hardened from her years of rough living, the ballad boasts an
ebbing, fluttering string arrangement, and the legend's hypnotic voice
floats above it all.

Although Holiday wrestled with drug abuse and no-good men, she
conveyed much more than despair in her music. She could be flirty
("Them There Eyes" and "What a Little Moonlight Can Do") and wise
("Detour Ahead" and "I'm a Fool to Want You").

Contrary to some of the myths, Holiday's life was quite
extraordinary: A black woman born into crippling poverty in
Philadelphia on April 7, 1915, she rose to international fame as a
vocalist, forever revolutionizing the art of singing along the way.

"She had a beautiful life relative to what people went through
then," Kahn says. "A lot of brothers and sisters went through hell and
didn't sign a contract to sing about it on stage at Carnegie Hall."

Holiday was uptown and down-home. She was self-indulgent and had a
long line of lovers: male and female, black and white.

She cussed; she drank gin. She smoked cigarettes and cooked soul
food for friends. Baked pigs' feet and red beans and rice were her
specialties.

Beyond such classics as "Strange Fruit" and "God Bless the Child,"
perhaps her two best-known recordings, beyond the tales (twisted and
true) of reckless living, Holiday was a trailblazer. Elements of her
style, musical and otherwise, endure. You see her elegantly
understated fashion sense in the way Sade dresses: the simple lines,
the slick ponytail, the hoop earrings. You hear echoes of her
phrasing in the music of Erykah Badu, Norah Jones, Macy Gray, Amos
Lee.

An individualist 
"She really created her own thing as an artist," says Byron, who
also produced the 1992 Cable Ace Award-winning documentary "Lady Day: The
Many Faces of Billie Holiday." "All you have to do is listen to her
music through the '30s and the '50s and you see the arc of her life."

Kahn says, "The really great performers know how to reach into their
lives and translate the peaks and valleys, the joys and pains. But
there is still a sense of performance there, some mystery. Nobody
did that better than Billie Holiday."

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