Why Billie Holiday Matters

“You never heard singing so lazy, so slow, with such a drawl,” Ralph Cooper said as he urged the Apollo to hire a new young singer he’d discovered in a club in Harlem. “I don’t know what it is but you got to hear her.”

Today we call it jazz singing, back then they called it Billie Holiday.

Ahead of Lady Day’s 100^th birthday this Tuesday, April 7, music lovers are extoling the virtues of a pivotal song stylist whose unique phrasing “created the standards by which jazz singers are judged.”

In his biography Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth, which comes out this week, John Szwed describes the singer’s voice as “falling behind the beat, floating, breathing where it’s not expected, scooping up notes and then letting them fall.”

In addition to her emotional delivery, Billie Holiday’s intuition as an instrumentalist fascinates jazz fans. Many, including Billie herself, say she sang like a trumpet. “I don’t think I’m singing,” she explained. “I feel like I’m playing a horn… What comes out is what I feel.”

Ran Blake, pianist and educator at New England Conservatory, told the New York Times that his students find notating Billie Holiday’s Deep Song“vastly harder than five or six bars of a Bartok piece.” And Phil Schaap, Curator of Jazz at Lincoln Center, told NPR Billie’s inventiveness and emotional intensity was “genius” and “beyond words.”

“She can make you hear the rhythm section if it’s not there, and make them play better if they are,” he said. “I think Billie Holiday is the greatest.”

Billie Holiday’s indelible contribution to American music will be celebrated widely over the coming weeks and months. As the New York Times notes, tributes from Cassandra Wilson, José James and many others are planned for the coming weeks in the New York area. The Apollo will be honoring Lady Day with a star on its Walk of Fame on Monday night.

This week will bring a flurry of album and book releases honoring Billie Holiday’s legacy, and tribute concert tributes are planned from Louisville to Lahti, Finland.

What they celebrate is not the tragic dark princess image that has haunted Lady’s legacy; her battles with racism, abuse, hard drinking, and drugs inseparable from her suffering, and thus her art.

What we’re really celebrating is a woman who had the courage to articulate her unthinkable suffering, and the skill to do so while sounding disarmingly beautiful

Why Billie Holiday Matters is an article from: The Inquisitr News