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REVIEWS (click on a writer to go to their article)
April 2008 - Henrik Kaldahl Spring 2008 Signal To Noise - Stuart Broomer By I don't know precisely when I first heard Billie Holiday, but I was certainly aware of her by the time I was twelve, around 1960 when I heard the Columbia LP of The Sound of Jazz, a companion to the landmark 1957 television program that presented jazz musicians as they might have appeared in a recording studio. Holiday sang a version of "Fine and Mellow," her original and absolutely defining blues number. It was among her last great performances. Within a couple of years I would have absorbed much of what was going on in jazz at the tie and I would have heard the Max Roach/Abbey Lincoln recordings on Candid. It was likely from the notes to Lincoln's Straight Ahead or a corresponding interview in the jazz press of the day that I would first read of unrequited love as the defining condition of the Holiday ethos. Through the years I've been conscious of Holiday. My wife has always been fond of her, so I bought the LPs and later amassed a small collection of her CDs. Holiday was clearly a genius: she synthesized all the best sounds of the 20s, the depth of passion of Bessie Smith somehow levitated in the pop lightness of Ethel Waters then given infinitely more flexibility with the brilliant phrasing of Louis Armstrong (and later Lester Young). Most jazz singing simply irritates me, but Holiday is something special. What's most extraordinary is her emotional complexity, simultaneously fragile and resilient, encapsulating everything that is most central to the human experience listen to the brightest, most insouciant novelty number of the 1930s and some of the pain and wreckage of her last agonized recordings is already articulated in her sound, in the grain of her voice. Similarly, a late performance like "Fine and Mellow" has overtones that suggest all the playful expectation of twenty years before might suddenly spring to life anew. The presence of her voice is immediate. Is it the drawl or the richness of the high harmonics which bubble effervescently, a complex sound that seems so much more alive than other voices? The grit - the rasp - of the later, damaged voice is the low-register mirror of those ambient highs. In recent years the Holiday oeuvre has become as ubiquitous as it is brilliant. I walk into a woody, dingy inner-city vegan cafe and her voice drifts off the owner's mix tape; in a slick deli in a yuppie neighborhood, I hear her broadcast digitally over satellite radio. I hear her in bookstores (both the chains and the independently-owned) that play the local jazz radio station. A few weeks ago my wife and I were browsing a warehouse sale filled with cargo container household merchandise. Playing over the sound system was Billie Holiday (you could buy cheap knockoff compilations of her work there). And then it struck me, the continued centrality of Holiday to the contemporary experience: It's the sound of unrequited shopping, the song that let's us know that, no matter how much we love merchancise (including the reified songs of Billie Holiday), it won't love us back. No matter how much we search, we won't find the right product, through search we must. I won't claim to be an authority on Holiday's recordings. If I wanted to be, I would probably spend a good deal of time at www.billieholiday.be, a comprehensive web-discography from Belgium. The best part might be the statistics. The most remarkable? The home page claims to contain the contents of 1081 albums; contrast that with the total of complete issued music tracks - 799. Yes, there are substantially more albums than individual tracks, giving some sense of the extent to which Holiday has been packaged and re-packaged, marketed, re-marketed, both by companies with legitimate claims and by bootleg outfits. There's also the common practice of finding affinities between Holiday's sound and contemporary singers who sound nothing like her, a kind of marketing by proxy. But none of this should interfere with your enjoyment this 5-CD anthology on ESP Records. It spans Holiday's entire career, and it's very much a documentary effort. Steering well clear of the studio recordings, it has live club and theatre dates, usually originating as radio broadcasts, and there are her appearances in films and on TV talk shows, complete with introductions and patter. It presents Holiday's public career as much as her music, including her bizarre turn as a singing maid in the film New Orleans (with some of the best inter-racial dialogue this side of Gone With The Wind). Danny Kaye introduces Jerome Kern to give Holiday an Esquire magazine award. The liner-notes mix key events in her career with the track listings and description of the music here, so it's a cavalcade of Billie Holiday, her life and public reception as well as her singing. The music is often wonderful, and you hear Holiday with many of her equals, opening with a film soundtrack with Ellington (1934's Symphony in Black) and a broadcast with the Basie Band (from the Savoy Ballroom in 1937) through 1946's New Orleans with Louis Armstrong to some club tunes with Stan Getz. She's interviewed on air by guitarist-host Eddie Condon and appears on the Tonight Show (though not with Johnny Carson as the notes would have it - it wouldn't be Carson's show until a decade later.). There are multiple appearances with Steve Allen and the set's concluding performances are superb 1950 recordings with Basie. Given the focus on media events and live performances, you get multiple takes of Holiday's most popular songs - "My Man," "Fine and Mellow" (best in an Apollo Theatre broadcast with Hot Lips Page) and "I Cover the Waterfront" appear repeatedly - giving both a sense of how much Holiday's performances of the same song could change, and how much her public's perception of her depended on just a few titles. Anyone new to Holiday gets a sense of the entire sweep of her career; anyone familiar with the often superior studio material gets an excellent portrait of the Holiday career in context. It's a fine complement to the Columbia, Commodore, Decca and Verve sets. Wall Street Journal 2008 - Nat Hentoff "Billie must have come from another world," said Roy Eldridge, often heard accompanying her on trumpet, "because nobody had the effect on people she had. I've seen her make them cry and make them happy." Lady Day, as tenor saxophonist Lester Young named Billie Holiday, still has that effect through the many reissues of her recordings, including the recently released "Lady Day: The Master Takes and Singles" of the 1933-44 sessions (Columbia/Legacy, available on Amazon) that established her in the jazz pantheon. I grew up listening to those sides, which infectiously demonstrated -- as pianist Bobby Tucker, her longtime pianist, noted -- that "she could swing the hardest in any tempo, even if it was like a dirge . . . wherever it was, she could float on top of it." But none of the previous reissues, as imperishable as they are, have as intense a presence of Lady as in the truly historic new five-disc set "Billie Holiday: Rare Live Recordings 1934-1959" on Bernard Stollman's ESP-Disk label (on Amazon, in stores, or at espdisk.com). This is a model for future retrospectives of classic jazz artists of any era because researcher and compiler Michael Anderson, in his extensive liner notes, provides a timeline of her jazz life -- describing the circumstances of each performance in the context of her evolving career. One example: a live radio remote from Harlem's Savoy Ballroom in 1937 when the 22-year-old singer "began a special association with her comrade, 'The Prez,' Lester Young" -- grooving with the Count Basie band in "Swing Brother Swing." Producer Anderson is a veteran radio broadcaster (including gigs at WBGO-FM in Newark, N.J., and with Sirius Satellite Radio) and a former jazz drummer. He was in Sun Ra's fabled visionary Arketstra and led bands of his own. As Mr. Anderson was growing up, collecting jazz records, "in my early teens," he told me, "I would have a Billie Holiday day each week where I only played her music." His devoted immersion in tracking down performances by her from around the country takes us, for example, from an after-hours Harlem club, Clark Monroe's Uptown House, in 1941 to the Eddie Condon radio show in 1949, where Holiday dedicates "Keep on Rainin' " to Bessie Smith, whom she heard on records back in her hometown, Baltimore. There is a series of extraordinarily moving sets at George Wein's Boston club, Storyville (from which I used to do jazz remotes), in 1951. Billie, backed by just a house rhythm section, is more deeply affecting in "I Cover the Waterfront," "Crazy He Calls Me" and other songs here than in any of her studio interpretations. Six years later, she was on CBS TV's "The Sound of Jazz," for which Whitney Balliett and I had selected the musicians. In a sequence still being played around the world, she sings her own blues, "Fine and Mellow," with Lester Young among the players. Once close, Billie and The Prez had grown apart. But on this meeting Young, though in failing health, stood up and played one of the purest blues choruses I'd ever heard, and Billie -- her eyes meeting his -- joined him back in private time, smiling. In the control room, there were tears in my eyes and in those of the director and the sound engineer. It was on that program that she said, "Anything I sing is part of my life." And her singing became part of many peoples' lives. She sometimes performed just for friends. During a private recording in this collection, Billie sings "My Yiddishe Mama" and then her own autobiographical song of rebellious independence, "God Bless the Child," to a youngster in the room. I doubt that child fully understood the import of the lyrics then, but the child may well have later in life. Especially revealing of Billie's evolving approaches to a song is a series of rehearsals with bassist Artie Shapiro and pianist Jimmy Rowles, the master accompanist to jazz vocalists. Between takes, she talks about her early jobs with bands and jokes with Rowles. What should surprise some of the critics who have concluded that in Billie's last years her voice and spirits showed the wear and strain of her sometime discordant personal life are the final performances here at Storyville in April 1959. Her singing, three months before she died at the age of 44, swings with the verve, the wit and the essential quality that her admirer Ray Charles sums up at the end of the fifth disc: "To be any kind of a singer you have to have feeling, and the one thing you can't teach is feeling." As evidence, Holiday concludes her last 1959 set at Storyville with her own "Billie's Blues": I ain't good lookin' and my hair ain't curled, but my mother, she give me something, it's gonna carry me through this world. A year before Billie died, I was talking with Miles Davis about the increasing lament, even among some musicians, that she was breaking down into a much lesser Lady Day. "You know," Miles said in exasperation at those ears that had turned to tin, "she's not thinking now what she was in 1937. And she still has control, probably more control than then." At the end of his liner notes for his remarkable achievement in discovering and assembling this "live" musical biography in "Billie Holiday: Rare Live Recordings 1934-1959," Michael Anderson writes: "Later generations have an entire legacy to discover, and veteran enthusiasts can always recollect the times the music of Lady Day was vibrant and alive through everything she had gone through in her life." Billie once spoke of what Louis Armstrong's trumpet meant to her as a young girl in Baltimore: "He didn't say any words but somehow it just moved me so. It sounded so sad and sweet, all at the same time. It sounded like he was making love to me. That's how I wanted to sing." It wasn't that, as Roy Eldridge said, she'd co me from another world. Rough as her own life had been between songs in this world, Billie became -- and will continue to become -- part of so many lives. Link to article 2-15-08 The Big Picture – Friday Night Jazz By now, you should have some feel for my taste in music, and the wide ranging and eclectic flavors that live on my iPod. But unless you are a fool or a wizened old pro, any attempt at doing a Friday Night Jazz on Billie Holiday is likely to fall flat on its face. Lucky for us, Nat Hentoff -- formerly the Music critic of the Village Voice, and now the Jazz columnist of the WSJ is just such an old pro. In this week's WSJ, he looked at a few new reissues of Lady Day's music: "Billie must have come from another world," said Roy Eldridge, often heard accompanying her on trumpet, "because nobody had the effect on people she had. I've seen her make them cry and make them happy." Lady Day, as tenor saxophonist Lester Young named Billie Holiday, still has that effect through the many reissues of her recordings, including the recently released "Lady Day: The Master Takes and Singles" of the 1933-44 sessions (Columbia/Legacy, available on Amazon) that established her in the jazz pantheon. I grew up listening to those sides, which infectiously demonstrated -- as pianist Bobby Tucker, her longtime pianist, noted -- that "she could swing the hardest in any tempo, even if it was like a dirge . . . wherever it was, she could float on top of it." But none of the previous reissues, as imperishable as they are, have as intense a presence of Lady as in the truly historic new five-disc set "Billie Holiday: Rare Live Recordings, 1934-1959" on Bernard Stollman's ESP-Disk label. This is a model for future retrospectives of classic jazz artists of any era because researcher and compiler Michael Anderson, in his extensive liner notes, provides a timeline of her jazz life -- describing the circumstances of each performance in the context of her evolving career. One example: a live radio remote from Harlem's Savoy Ballroom in 1937 when the 22-year-old singer "began a special association with her comrade, 'The Prez,' Lester Young" -- grooving with the Count Basie band in "Swing Brother Swing." How could I possibly hope to improve on that? February 12, 2008 All About Jazz – Lyn Horton The mystique associated with musical artists who have passed away often preoccupies those who continue to maintain an avid interest in the past of those musicians. A question to ask though is: how can anyone possibly know the internal perils and joys of these intriguing artistic beings? No matter how much research is done or how much listening occurs, there is an undeniable limit to what can be discussed or interpreted. The release of Billie Holiday: Rare Live Recordings, 1934-1959, offers the opportunity to hear Holiday on the side of history. There is something extraordinarily intimate about the quality of each cut, no matter in what venue, from big band gig to TV or recording studio, film or rehearsal hall. The intimacy clearly reveals her irreversibly certain approach to singing especially when contrasted to a sometimes timid, seemingly fatigued, husky, and frequently slurred speaking voice. The chronological presentation of the recording is advantageous to hearing the changes her voice underwent. The spark she sets with the Count Basie Big Band from 1937 seems to disappear and the syrupy character of her signature blues delivery begins to take over. Every word she sings is clearly audible and identification with the meaning of the words is absolutely possible. Her precision in accentuation is unrivaled. Over time, a youthful lightness in her voice yields to darkness. Her voice sounds worn and acquires a vibrato. Yet, her voice always conveys an expressiveness that no songstress has ever duplicated. On the last disk, ESP employs poetic license to create a vocal coda in placing tracks out of chronological order with “Please, Don't Talk About Me When I am Gone,” her own “God Bless the Child,” and then “Now or Never,” from a Basie session. Those songs are so elemental that becoming teary-eyed is easy. Hearing her describe the blues in her introductory remarks with the Roy Eldridge Band in 1957, “You just have to feel it,” is a poignant reminder for how to listen. The repetition of many songs over a period of years offers a sense of how she revisited them. “Porgy” is performed numerous times and progressively injected into the song are subtleties of phrasing and emphasis, changes in tonality and sheer emotion. “God Bless the Child,” “Lover Man,” “Billie's Blues” and “Them There Eyes” are also among the repeated songs. It is interesting that the anti-racist song, “Strange Fruit,” is only presented once, from her 1951 Storyville club session, given that, according to the fairly comprehensive liner notes, it was the most requested song in her concert circuit. The awesome task of writing about Holiday's music is more than humbling. Writing about a legend is audacious. Chronicling how the legend has been represented is more realistic and these rare live recordings have certainly met the challenge of bringing us nearer to the actuality of Billie Holiday. Yet, however her voice may intoxicate us still brings us no closer to understanding the real woman. Her mystique morphs into mystery. February 11, 2008 Jazz.com - Ted Gioia In October 1951, George Wein booked Billie Holiday to play at his Storyville nightclub in Boston, where she shared the bill with 24 year-old tenor saxophonist Stan Getz. Getz had modeled his sound on Lester Young, Holiday's collaborator on many of her most celebrated recordings, and the idea of getting him to join her on stage for a few songs must have seemed an inspired move by all parties. The results - for once - more than lived up to the expectations. I can't recall another Holiday recording from the 1950s where she sings with such energy and enthusiasm. Getz, for his part, only plays obbligato, but you can sense his pride at serving as President - or Prez, to be more specific - for a day. This shimmering track is not well known, but deserves a place in the Lady Day Hall of Fame. Link January 14, 2008 New York Times - Ben Ratliff (from Critic's Choice New CDs by Jon Pareles) Here’s Billie Holiday singing “I Cried for You” at Monroe’s Uptown House, a Harlem club, in 1941. It’s not much like the controlled performance on her studio recording of the song five years earlier. Here she is hollering with effective hesitation between words. “I, cried, f’you,” she sings, “now, it’s your, turn, to cry, o-ver me.” From the audience a woman screams back at her. The rhythm section sounds faint and smudgy. The track comes from an old bootleg, made by a portable recorder in the club. It is still one of the best recordings in jazz. Even under the layers of her public persona and singing style, which thickened in the ’50s, Holiday was a completely radical singer. Rhythmically she was vicious. In a pinched honk she could sing long chunks of a song within a small pitch range, moving all the emphasis toward her magic tricks with time. Her well-known studio records are great of course. But without hearing her live you might understand her only partially, especially since 50 years of fishy-looking releases from fly-by-night labels of live Holiday performances have made it hard for the average person to expect that these recordings could be any good. On the surface this new five-disc collection doesn’t exactly right the situation. This box’s presentation — particularly the organization of the liner notes and their sense of chronology — is a dog’s breakfast. The set raises a lot of questions, yet it’s also half-stupendous for the recordings it brings together in one place. Just about everything here has been available for a long time, if sometimes in dubious packages. (About a quarter of the boxed set derives from a New York jazz enthusiast named Boris Rose, who recorded live broadcast performances over the radio at home and sold his acetate discs by mail-order.) Some of these tracks — radio transcriptions or rehearsal tapes — have surfaced as curiosities on reputable CD reissues by Sony or Verve. Blindfold yourself and listen. In the ’30s and ’40s Holiday is great beyond belief. In some of the ’50s tracks she becomes increasingly slurry or tired, and you hear her using art to fight through it (although a concert performance in Boston three months before her death in 1959 is amazingly lucid). The virtue of the set is all the changing period context, everything surrounding her: ’40s stage announcers, studio orchestras and pickup bands, even the bad dialogue from her bit part in the film “New Orleans.” It’s confusing, yet it all helps you understand Holiday’s passage from a hard-core swing singer into a pop idol. Link December 20, 2007 Artvoice (v6n51) - Edward Batchelder A quick search on Billie Holiday in Amazon music turns up more than a thousand hits—selections, collections, anthologies, boxed sets, imports, bootlegs, DVDs and even remixes—which begs the question of whether we really need yet another Holiday CD for the holidays. In fact, yes. ESP Disc, known for its pioneering free jazz recordings in the 1960s, has managed to assemble five CDs of lesser-known live recordings, interviews and rehearsal sessions that manage to throw a new light on Holiday’s career. Jazz is, at its core, a thing of the moment, a flickering communication among musicians shaped by an audience, and what some of these recordings lack in high fidelity they more than compensate for in spirit. The screams of approval and backtalk from the audience remind us just how popular and raucous jazz once was, and what sort of rapport Holiday had with a live audience. More than that, though, the discs trace the trajectory of her voice, unmasked by studio tricks and second takes, from the jaunty insouciance of her early performances through the peak of her career and back down the other side when smoking, drinking, drugs and despair had left her sounding, as one critic put it, “like her voice had died and come back to haunt us from the grave.” Like many jazz singers, Holiday claimed that she wanted to sing like a horn, and that’s nowhere clearer than on live recordings like these. You can hear just how instrumental her inflection is—her tendency to slide into notes from below, to stretch the tempo, slur and quaver, and shift the coloring of her voice for greater expressivity. There are innumerable singers more virtuosic than Holiday, but her appeal lies in bringing an almost conversational intimacy to her singing. Compare, for example, her early, stiff and faltering version of “Fine and Mellow” from 1941 with the magisterial sadness of her performance 16 years later for the TV program The Sound of Jazz, where she lingers over the notes as if she were saying goodbye to them for the last time. “There’s two kinds of blues,” she says in an interview right before the song. “There’s happy blues and there’s sad blues.” Tragically for her, her greatest strength lay in the latter, and yet that’s what can make even her most ravaged recordings worth listening to. Link December 7, 2007 Deseret News - Chris Hicks BILLIE HOLIDAY; "Lady Day: The Master Takes and Singles" (ESP-Disk) *** 1/2; BILLIE HOLIDAY; "Rare Live Recordings: 1934-59" (Legacy/Columbia) **** The four-disc "Lady Day" set is composed of first-rate remasters but misses some songs that are not in Columbia's catalog. Still, fans will enjoy. But the "Rare Live Recordings" set is just that, and as such provides a fabulous trek through Holiday's career via a variety of performance venues — in performance halls, and on radio and television, from 1935-59. "Rare Live" is a must-have for fans. Link December 7, 2007 Oregonlive.com - Luciana Lopez (from A&E Cover Story: Wired Gift Guide) Has anyone ever made a broken heart sound so riveting? Lady Day is still sorely missed, but this five-CD set collects live recordings from the last 25 years of the singer's tragically short life (she died at age 44). Almost 50 years since her passing, her power has not diminished.. Link December 6, 2007, L'etoile magazine's Holiday Gift Guide - Clifford Allen One of the most influential vocalists in jazz and popular music history, Billie Holiday understood the true meaning of the voice as an instrument - not a scatter, but with an intonation and phrasing that matched great saxophonists like Ben Webster, Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins. This five-CD set culled from acetates, radio transcriptions and private recordings, covers the span of Holiday's career with an ear turned to chronologically exploring her art (few commercially-released Holiday programs have done so to this degree). Her collaborators here include Young, Hawkins, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Roy Eldridge, Art Tatum and many other jazz greats. Packaged with detailed recording data, archival photos and essays, this set from ESP-Disk adds much to her legacy and might have even the most avid fan reconsidering her life and work. Other archival recordings out this holiday season from ESP-Disk include the complete Lester Young broadcast performances from Birdland as well as reissued material from pianist and free-jazz pioneer Burton Greene. Link November 22 2007, USA TODAY - Ken Barnes A box set for every musical taste All Music Guide - Arwulf Arwulf 48 years after her passing, Billie Holiday was honored with a five-CD set of Rare Live Recordings that includes film soundtracks, concert and club performances, radio and television broadcasts, rehearsal tapes, and even a private home recording where Lady Day sings "My Yiddishe Mama" and "God Bless the Child" to a child! If you think you know this singer, tap into this collection and see how much more there was to her than at first meets the ear. The more or less chronological presentation maps her personal and artistic transformation between the years 1934 and 1959. Out of approximately 60 titles, seven are rendered no less than four times apiece, and three -- "Them There Eyes," "God Bless the Child" and "Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone" -- appear in five different versions. For this reason, those who seek a nice all-purpose, easy-to-use sampler of her career should probably consult her studio recordings first. ESP's Rare Live Recordings set is for people who have been smitten for life and cannot possibly get enough Billie Holiday. The intertwined discography, biographical chronology, and extensive liner notes spread out over two booklets, are at once informative, insightful and (unfortunately) sprinkled with typographic, editorial, and even factual errors. The worst of these is a glaringly incorrect statement in reference to the CBS Sound of Jazz television broadcast of December 8, 1957, whereby the producer makes the statement that "...this would also prove to be one of the last performances for baritone saxophonist Harry Carney." The reference was actually to tenor saxophonist Lester Young, who would die almost exactly four months before the passing of Lady Day in 1959. (Carney, of course, lived for another 17 years as the bass clef backbone of the Duke Ellington Orchestra.) Furthermore, the amazing rehearsal tapes are only partially represented here; they were reissued in their entirety on CD in 2006 as Songs & Conversations: The Lost Billie Holiday Session (SRI 510021). Why ESP-Disk omitted several tracks from this soul-baring workshop (taped in bassist Artie Bernstein's living room with a rather outspoken Jimmy Rowles at the piano) is puzzling and maybe even frustrating. But let's not allow these flaws to detract too much from the magnificence of this extended tribute to a great artist. ESP-Disk, one of the world's great independent record labels, is to be commended for having Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker and Bud Powell in the same catalog with Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, Marion Brown, Frank Wright, Pharoah Sanders, Patty Waters, Pearls Before Swine and Yma Sumac. Given the relatively easy availability of Lady Day's Vocalion/Columbia, Decca, and Verve studio recordings, this fascinating anthology of her uncommon works can and will act as a richly rewarding appendix to the more familiar portions of her legacy. Link In 1972, thirteen years after her death, Congress extended copyright protections to include recorded musical performances. Holiday would have benefited greatly from such protection: During the more than twenty-five years of her career Holiday gave an unknown number of live performances on TV and radio and in clubs and concert halls, many of which were recorded both officially and unofficially by sound engineers, fellow musicians, and fans. Today ESP-Disk Records, which for many years has been assembling unofficial recordings of several artists from before 1972, has released one of the most comprehensive collections of live Billie Holiday recordings to date, some previously available but most not. These Holiday recordings, laid out in chronological order, not only demonstrate the arc of Holiday’s development as a vocalist but give a rare behind-the-scenes look into how the singer approached her musicians and her audience. The first disc of this compilation opens with a twenty-year-old Billie Holiday performing with Duke Ellington in 1935, followed by a radio broadcast from the Savoy Hotel in New York City two years later in which Holiday fronts the Count Basie Orchestra, with which she toured during the late 1930s. By the time of these live recordings Holiday had already been singing professionally for several years in Harlem clubs and working with the best musicians on the vanguard of the nascent jazz scene—specifically horn players like Lester Young and Benny Goodman. Holiday had learned her craft from listening to Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith records in her hometown of Baltimore, but no one taught her how to pace her phrases, to alter the melody in such a simple yet unerring way, to charge each word with emotional urgency—these musical gifts were hers. The next four discs cover Holiday’s career from 1949 to her death in 1959. During those ten years, by which time jazz had taken firm hold in the public consciousness as the language of modernity, advances in radio and TV technology changed the way Americans consumed entertainment, and the mass proliferation of recorded media from that time leaves us with dozens of examples of Holiday’s live performances. Set in the context of other early recorded media presentations it is easy to imagine how revolutionary Holiday’s singing sounded to mainstream American audiences, with her plaintive voice and blues inflections and uncensored delivery. Included is a portfolio of photographs and performance data detailing a historical timeline of rare radio and television broadcasts, and concert performances, and the events and situations that lead to these powerful performances; along with explanations some of her most popular material, such as Strange Fruit. |
