Jazz Articles about Billie Holiday

like 742

Billie Holiday: Lady Day - The Master Takes and Singles

by David Rickert
November 9, 2007

Billie Holiday Lady Day - The Master Takes And Singles Columbia Records 2007

It's fitting that singer Billie Holiday began the most celebrated part of her career with Columbia in 1933, when the country was in the throes of the depression, and ended it in 1942, when the world was gripped by war. Her anguished delivery fit in perfectly with the times. As she projected the torments of her life through music, ...

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Billie Holiday: God Bless The Child: The Very Best Of Billie Holiday & Masters of Jazz

by Suzanne Lorge
April 8, 2007

Billie Holiday began singing professionally in the early 1930s and toured and recorded until her death in 1959. Her only hiatus from performing came during a 10-month stay at the Federal Woman's Reformatory in Alederton, West Virginia for drug possession in 1947. Her story reveals the symbiosis between personal pain and early jazz, and that story is best told through her recordings. Two reissues from the early and middle portions of her career show both the gradual demise of her ...

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Lady Sings The Blues: The 50th Anniversary Edition

by Suzanne Lorge
February 10, 2007

Lady Sings The Blues: The 50th Anniversary Edition Billie Holiday with William Dufty Softcover; 231 pages ISBN: 978-0-7679-2386-6 Harlem Moon/Broadway Books 2006

In 1956 Billie Holiday sat down with ghostwriter William Dufty and recounted the story of her life. At times during the 224-page narrative Holiday seems compelled to justify the telling of her tale and issues rueful warnings about the dangers of drug use, as if her artistry were ...

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Billie's Last Chorus

by Rob Mariani
November 20, 2006

She came on last at a concert that started at midnight at the Lowe's Sheraton on Seventh Avenue in The Village. It was one of those big, everybody-gets-to-play jam sessions they called concerts then, and it probably cost the promoters less than what Kenny G spends on hair gel these days. But there were at least a dozen top-flight groups including Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, Chet Baker's quartet, Al Cohn and {{Zoot Sims with Conte Candoli. But Billie Holiday was ...

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With Billie

by David Rickert
June 2, 2005

Julia Blackburn With Billie Pantheon Books ISBN: 0-375-40610-7 368 pages

In 1974 the Mark Twain Hotel renamed rooms 203 and 204 as the Billie Holiday Suite. It was decorated with period pieces from her stay in 1949, but it also featured framed newspaper reports from the drug bust that happened there as well. This story from the new book With Billie illuminates a familiar occurrence in Holiday's life: her drug use sometimes ...

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Billie Holiday: The Sensitive & 1937-1952

by Joel Roberts
May 7, 2005

A search on Amazon reveals an absurd total of 498 Billie Holiday titles, including imports and out-of- print albums. That begs the question, “Do we really need another Holiday compilation? Two releases from Europe try to provide an affirmative answer.

Billie Holiday 1937-1952 Nocturne

The first collection, a two-disc set from the French Nocturne label covers the years 1937-1952 and seems geared primarily to jazz novices. The two discs are divided along the rather clumsy lines ...

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Billie Holiday: Billie Holiday Live at Storyville

by AAJ Staff
January 21, 2003

Though born in Baltimore, Billie Holiday had strong ties to Massachusetts throughout her career. Her final performance, in fact, took place in Lowell, cradle of the industrial revolution. Long before that tragic set, however, Holiday recorded a series of shows at George Wein’s legendary Boston club Storyville. Though separated by two years from 1951-53, these discreet recordings capture “Lady Day" in prime emotive voice. From the first of Carl Drunkard’s watery piano drops which open “I Cover The Waterfront" to ...