A revealing ‘meditation’ on Billie Holiday celebrates her originality as an artist rather than dwelling on her private life
In her centenary year, Billie Holiday remains defined by tragedy; a dazzling talent whose early life was blighted by poverty, and whose years of celebrity were scarred by addiction, brutal marriages and institutionalised racism. This is the story laid bare in Holiday’s 1956 autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, reiterated in numerous subsequent narratives and exploited by the limp, fictionalised 1972 biopic starring Diana Ross. John Szwed, a former Columbia professor and feted musical biographer, can’t rescue Holiday from tragedy, but his slim, illuminating account restores to the singer the dignity of a true artist, one who emerges from his pages – and the records to which they drive you hungrily back – as a revolutionary. It’s not a conventional biography but what Szwed calls “a meditation… the story of her art”.
That’s especially true of the book’s latter half, “The Musician”, where Szwed analyses Holiday’s vocal technique and what one critic called “her alarming and irresistible rhythmic liberties”. Holiday sang notoriously behind the beat, rephrasing and giving new meaning to whatever she sang.
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