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I'll Remember April - Happy Jazz Appreciation Month!

By Mary Foster Conklin

A smooth segue from Women's History into Jazz Appreciation Month, commencing with a celebration of Gene Bertoncini, Freddie Hubbard and John Pizzarelli's birthdays in the first hour and concluding with a celebration of Billie Holiday in the final hour, plus new releases from Ashley Pezzotti, Ulysses Owens, Jr., Alicia Olatuja and Claire Martin & Jim Mullen and more birthday nods to Alberta Hunter, Doris Day and Andre Previn, among others. Playlist Tom Wolfe & Gene Bertoncini “I'll Remember ...

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 ...

Tracy Fessenden: Religion Around Billie Holiday

By Steve 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 ...

The 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 ...

Jazz: 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 ...

Vocal 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 ...

Billie 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 ...

Billie 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 ...

Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday

By Ken Dryden

Billie Holiday Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday Naxos 2009

Billie Holiday has long been acknowledged as one of the greatest jazz vocalists of all time. With her extensive catalogue of recordings for several labels, Holiday's music has been readily accessible though relatively little live footage with audio is available. Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday integrates film and video performances, recordings, words from her controversial autobiography ...

Billie Holiday Fifty Years Later: A Tribute and Reassessment

By Victor L. Schermer

Fifty years ago, on July 17, 1959, Billie Holiday died an untimely death at age 44 in a New York hospital from complications of drug and alcohol dependency. Now, half a century after her passing, it is an appropriate hommage to reflect once again on her legacy as a singer, an African American woman, a victim-- of a traumatic childhood, spousal abuse, and substance dependence--and a powerful creative force for the times she lived in. Though less of a “pop ...

Becoming Billie Holiday

By Larry Reni Thomas

Becoming Billie Holiday Carole Boston Weatherford Hardcover; 120 pages ISBN: 159078507X Wordsong Press 2008

Award-winning poet and professor Carole Boston Weatherford's latest, excellent book, Becoming Billie Holiday--a fictional verse memoir, as Weatherford describes it--reaches out and grabs the reader's attention as if Holiday herself was on stage and her entire life was unfolding before your very eyes. Weatherford's wonderful poems, which have titles from Holiday's songbook, are so ...

Billie Holiday: Lady Day: The Master Takes and Singles & Rare Live Recordings 1934-1959

By Andrew Velez

Billie Holiday Lady Day--The Master Takes and Singles Columbia-Legacy 2007 Billie Holiday Rare Live Recordings 1934-1959 ESP-Disk 2007

The earliest 11 sides on Lady Day, a quartet box of discs taken from the Grammy Award-winning 10-CD box of 2001, are among the many cuts with pianist Teddy Wilson's orchestra. Only 20 ...