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Jazz Articles about Billie Holiday
Billie Holiday: Lady Sings The Blues
by Ian Patterson
Lady Sings The Blues Billie Holiday/William Dufty 180 Pages ISBN: 978-0-241-35129-1 Penguin Modern Classics 2018 For many, Billie Holiday was the greatest of all the jazz singers, while her emotive delivery and tragic persona seemed to embody the early jazz life in all its boho chic and with all its dark undertones. Six decades after her death from alcohol-related illness at the age of forty four, Holiday remains a hugely admired and somewhat ...
Continue ReadingTracy Fessenden: Religion Around Billie Holiday
by S.G Provizer
Religion Around Billie Holiday Tracy Fessenden 280 pages ISBN: #9780271080956 Cambridge University Press 2018 This is one of the most unusual books about a jazz figure that I've encountered in a long time. The premise, as spelled out in this interview with author Fessenden, is fascinating. She is the Steve and Margaret Forster Professor and interim Director of the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. Her previous ...
Continue ReadingThe Timeless Voice Of Billie Holiday
by Ava Louise
The name Billie Holiday seems indelibly linked with jazz. Her vocal quality and style were unique and masterful, and her work helped to define the genre. Modern jazz musicians and vocalists earn their chops from refining their performance of standards and many of these were recorded and performed for the first time by Holiday. She was also a pioneer in civil rights activism through protest song performance. By her own account, she was a vocalist who needed a ...
Continue ReadingJazz: The Sacred and the Profane
by Victor L. Schermer
“As above, so below" --Hermes Trismegistus A warning: this article is worth reading only if you believe, as I do, that jazz is not just a form of entertainment, but an art form that has deep significance for our lives and contributes to our search for meaning. I fully appreciate the value of “digging the music" and leaning into it for its rhythmic syncopation and feelings of fun and excitement. But for many of us, jazz is part ...
Continue ReadingVocal Jazz: 1917-1950
by Mathew Bahl
There have been as many variations on the definition of vocal jazz as there have been people with opinions. Over the years, the consensus within the jazz community has shifted frequently as critics and fans have wrestled with the often-competing imperatives of improvisation and interpretation. For some people, vocal jazz should be exactly that -voices improvising solos in the manner of jazz instrumentalists. For others, that view disregards a singer's unique relationship to lyrics. At the turn of ...
Continue ReadingBillie Holiday: Four Classic Albums Plus
by David Rickert
Billie HolidayFour Classic AlbumsAvid Records2011 Back in the 1950s, when the American people were buying television sets and driving gas guzzlers on brand new superhighways under the threat of nuclear war, singer Billie Holiday was still turning out fine performances on record and on stage, defying a lot of expectations raised by her wayward lifestyle. Holiday only had a few years left--she died in 1959--but continued performing right up to the ...
Continue ReadingBillie Holiday: The Complete Commodore & Decca Masters
by George Kanzler
Billie HolidayThe Complete Commodore & Decca MastersVerve Music Group2010 In 1959, Nina Simone made a black-pride point about her hit single, “I Loves You Porgy," very publicly proclaiming that she refused to use the (to her) demeaning dialect pronunciation “loves," substituting “love." It was the same year that Billie Holiday died, but few remembered that Holiday had, without fanfare, simply sang “love" instead of “loves" in her exquisite 1948 recording of ...
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