Artist: Billie Holiday
Genre(s):
Pop
Other
Jazz
Discography:
Remixed and Reimagined
Year: 2007
Tracks: 14
Lady In Satin
Year: 2005
Tracks: 12
Greatest Hits
Year: 1998
Tracks: 13
Billie Holiday: Jazz Master 12
Year: 1994
Tracks: 16
The Complete Billie Holiday On Verve (Cd 4)
Year: 1992
Tracks: 40
The Complete Billie Holiday On Verve (Cd 3)
Year: 1992
Tracks: 18
The Complete Billie Holiday On Verve (Cd 2)
Year: 1992
Tracks: 24
The Complete Billie Holiday On Verve (Cd 1)
Year: 1992
Tracks: 24
Billie's Blues
Year: 1954
Tracks: 15
The Complete Decca Recordings
Year: 1950
Tracks: 48
Billie Holiday And Her Orchest
Year: 1940
Tracks: 22
Lo Mejor De Billie Holiday
Year:
Tracks: 12
Ken Burns Jazz Series: Billie Holiday
Year:
Tracks: 19
Jazz Masters 47
Year:
Tracks: 16
The number one pop nothingness singer to move audiences with the intense, personal intuitive feeling of classic megrims, Billie Holiday changed the nontextual matter of American pop vocals forever and a day. Almost 50 years later on her end, it's difficult to believe that prior to her egress, jazz and pop singers were tied to the Tin Pan Alley tradition and seldom individualised their songs; only vapors singers like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey actually gave the impression they had lived through what they were vocalizing. Billie Holiday's extremely stylised indication of this blues tradition revolutionized traditional pop, rending the decades-long tradition of birdcall plugging in iI by refusing to compromise her prowess for either the call or the lot. She made clear her debts to Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong (in her autobiography she admitted, "I always wanted Bessie's swelled well-grounded and Pops' feeling"), just in truth her style was nigh her own, quite a shock absorber in an years of similar crooners and dance band singers.
With her flavor lustrous through on every transcription, Holiday's technological expertise besides excelled in comparison to the outstanding majority of her coevals. Often world-weary by the threadbare old Tin Pan Alley songs she was forced to track record early in her career, Holiday fooled around with the beat and the melody, phrasing behindhand the beat and often rejuvenating the banner line with harmonies borrowed from her favorite horn players, Armstrong and Lester Young. (She often said she well-tried to sing like a horn.) Her infamous private life -- a series of abusive relationships, subject matter addictions, and periods of depression -- undoubtedly aided her fabled status, only Holiday's best performances ("Lover Man," "Don't Explain," "Unusual Fruit," her have composition "God Bless the Child") remain among the most sore and completed vocal performances ever recorded. More than technological power, more than than whiteness of voice, what made Billie Holiday one of the topper vocalists of the century -- easily the touch of Ella Fitzgerald or Frank Sinatra -- was her unrelentingly individualist temperament, a quality that colored every one of her endlessly nuanced performances.
Billie Holiday's helter-skelter life reportedly began in Baltimore on April 7, 1915 (a few reports say 1912) when she was born Eleanora Fagan Gough. Her padre, Clarence Holiday, was a teenaged jazz guitar player and banjo player subsequently to play in Fletcher Henderson's Orchestra. He ne'er married her mother, Sadie Fagan, and left hand patch his girl was noneffervescent a baby. (She would subsequently run into him in New York, and though she contracted many guitarists for her sessions in front his death in 1937, she always avoided victimization him.) Holiday's mother was also a thomas Young stripling at the sentence, and whether because of inexperience or negligence, often left her daughter with detached relatives. Holiday was sentenced to Catholic reform schooling at the years of decade, reportedly subsequently she admitted organism sacked. Though sentenced to abide until she became an adult, a family friend helped pay off her released subsequently just two years. With her mother, she touched in 1927, number one to New Jersey and before long after to Brooklyn.
In New York, Holiday helped her mother with domesticated work, but shortly began moonlighting as a cyprian for the extra income. According to the weighty Billie Holiday fable (which gained additional acceptance afterward her notoriously apocryphal autobiography Lady Sings the Blues), her big singing break came in 1933 when a preposterous saltation audition at a speakeasy prompted her accompanyist to ask her if she could whistle. In fact, Holiday was most likely singing at clubs all over New York City as early as 1930-31. Whatever the true fib, she first gained some publicity in early 1933, when record producer John Hammond -- only three age older than Holiday herself, and just at the start of a legendary calling -- wrote her up in a pillar for Melody Maker and brought Benny Goodman to one of her performances. After recording a demo at Columbia Studios, Holiday linked a diminished grouping light-emitting diode by Goodman to make her commercial-grade debut on November 27, 1933 with "Your Mother's Son-In-Law."
Though she didn't return to the studio for all over a year, Billie Holiday spent 1934 moving up the rungs of the competitory New York bar scene. By early 1935, she made her debut at the Apollo Theater and appeared in a one-reeler film with Duke Ellington. During the last half of 1935, Holiday ultimately entered the studio once again and recorded a total of quatern roger Huntington Sessions. With a pick up circle supervised by pianist Teddy Wilson, she recorded a series of unknown, forgettable songs square from the gutters of Tin Pan Alley -- in other speech, the solely songs available to an isolated dark isthmus during the mid-'30s. (During the sweep era, music publishers unbroken the c. H. Best songs strictly in the hands of society orchestras and popular ovalbumin singers.) Despite the poor sung dynasty caliber, Holiday and various groups (including trumpeter Roy Eldridge, alto Johnny Hodges, and tenors Ben Webster and Chu Berry) energized flat songs like "What a Little Moonlight Can Do," "Twenty-four Hours a Day" and "If You Were Mine" (to say cypher of "Eeny Meeny Miney Mo" and "New Englander Doodle Never Went to Town"). The great jazz group playing and Holiday's more and more assured vocals made them quite a pop on Columbia, Brunswick and Vocalion.
During 1936, Holiday toured with groups light-emitting diode by Jimmie Lunceford and Fletcher Henderson, then returned to New York for various more roger Sessions. In late January 1937, she recorded several numbers game with a humble mathematical group culled from one of Hammond's novel discoveries, Count Basie's Orchestra. Tenor Lester Young, who'd concisely known Billie various years before, and trumpeter Buck Clayton were to become especially attached to Holiday. The trey did a great deal of their best recorded work out together during the late '30s, and Holiday herself bestowed the nickname Pres on Young, while he dubbed her Lady Day for her elegance. By the spring of 1937, she began touring with Basie as the female complement to his male isaac M. Singer, Jimmy Rushing. The association lasted less than a year, however. Though formally she was discharged from the band for beingness temperamental and undependable, vague influences higher up in the publication public reportedly commanded the action later she refused to begin singing '20s female blue devils standards.
At least temporarily, the move actually benefited Holiday -- less than a month after departure Basie, she was leased by Artie Shaw's popular circle. She began telling with the mathematical group in 1938, unitary of the first instances of a black female coming into court with a edward White group. Despite the chronic musical accompaniment of the entire band, however, demo promoters and radio set sponsors shortly began objecting to Holiday -- based on her irregular tattle style almost as much as her slipstream. After a series of escalating indignities, Holiday quit the band in churn up. Yet once again, her sound judgement proven valuable; the added freedom allowed her to take a gig at a hip young club named Café Society, the offset popular nightspot with an interracial audience. There, Billie Holiday learned the song that would launcher her career to a unexampled grade: "Strange Fruit."
The standard, written by Café Society regular Lewis Allen and incessantly fastened to Holiday, is an anguished reprisal of the intense racism noneffervescent persistent in the South. Though Holiday ab initio verbalised doubts approximately adding such a bald-headed, uncompromising song to her repertoire, she pulled it off thanks largely to her powers of subtlety and subtlety. "Strange Fruit" shortly became the high spot of her performances. Though John Hammond refused to record it (non for its politics only for its overly biting imagery), he allowed Holiday a bit of leverage to record for Commodore, the tag owned by jazz record-store owner Milt Gabler. Once released, "Strange Fruit" was prohibited by many radio outlets, though the growing nickelodeon industry (and the inclusion of the splendid "Fine and Mellow" on the toss) made it a rather large, though controversial, stumble. She continued transcription for Columbia labels until 1942, and hit heavy once again with her most famed authorship, 1941's "God Bless the Child." Gabler, wHO likewise worked A&R for Decca, signed her to the pronounce in 1944 to record "Devotee Man," a strain written especially for her and her third gear big hit. Neatly side-stepping the musician's brotherhood ban that impaired her former label, Holiday shortly became a precedence at Decca, earning the correct to high-grade material and lavish string sections for her sessions. She continued transcription illogical sessions for Decca during the rest of the '40s, and recorded respective of her favored songs including Bessie Smith's "'Tain't Nobody's Business If I Do," "Them There Eyes," and "Half-baked He Calls Me."
Though her art was at its peak, Billie Holiday's emotional life began a turbulent time period during the mid-'40s. Already heavily into intoxicant and marijuana, she began smoke opium early in the decennary with her first gear hubby, Johnnie Monroe. The wedlock didn't last, but hot on its heels came a second marriage to trumpeter Joe Guy and a impress to diacetylmorphine. Despite her exulting concert at New York's Town Hall and a small photographic film role -- as a housemaid (!) -- with Louis Armstrong in 1947's New Orleans, she lost a unspoilt dish out of money running her own orchestra with Joe Guy. Her mother's death before long after affected her deeply, and in 1947 she was arrested for possession of heroin and sentenced to eight-spot months in prison house.
Unfortunately, Holiday's troubles only continued after her release. The dose charge made it out of the question for her to get a cabaret card, so club performances were out of the motion. Plagued by various famous person hawks from all portions of the underworld (jazz, drugs, sung dynasty publication, etc.), she soldiered on for Decca until 1950. Two years later, she began transcription for jazz enterpriser Norman Granz, proprietor of the splendid labels Clef, Norgran, and by 1956, Verve. The recordings returned her to the small-group intimacy of her Columbia work, and reunited her with Ben Webster as well as early top-flight musicians such as Oscar Peterson, Harry "Sweets" Edison, and Charlie Shavers. Though the ravages of a knockout life were start to take their toll on her voice, many of Holiday's mid-'50s recordings are just as acute and beautiful as her hellenic work out.
During 1954, Holiday toured Europe to swell hail, and her 1956 autobiography brought her regular more than fame (or notoriety). She made her last-place great appearance in 1957, on the CBS tV extra The Sound of Jazz with Webster, Lester Young, and Coleman Hawkins providing a close financial backing. One class later, the Gentlewoman in Satin LP mantled her naked, progressively hoarse voice with the overwrought string section of Ray Ellis. During her last twelvemonth, she made 2 more than appearances in Europe in front collapsing in May 1959 of heart and liver disease. Still procuring heroin spell on her death bed, Holiday was arrested for possession in her private room and died on July 17, her system all unable to fight both withdrawal and heart disease at the same time. Her cult of influence spread quickly later her death and gave her more fame than she'd enjoyed in animation. The 1972 biopic Lady Sings the Blues featured Diana Ross struggling to overcome the contradictory myths of Holiday's life story, but the film as well well-lighted her tragic animation and introduced many future fans. By the digital age, virtually all of Holiday's recorded material had been reissued: by Columbia (nina from Carolina volumes of The Quintessential Billie Holiday), Decca (The Complete Decca Recordings), and Verve (The Complete Billie Holiday on Verve 1945-1959).
Meet Bill
