Billie Holiday
Billie Holiday (born Eleanora Fagan; 7 April 1915, Harlem, New York City
— 17 July 1959, New York) was a Jazz singer and songwriter.
Nicknamed “Lady Day” by her sometime collaborator Lester Young,
Billie Holiday was a seminal influence on Jazz and Pop singing. Her vocal style
— strongly inspired by instrumentalists — pioneered a new way of manipulating wording and
tempo, and also popularized a more personal and intimate approach to singing, changing
the art of Pop vocals forever. “The Queen of Song” co-wrote some songs,
and several of them have become Jazz standards, notably "God Bless The Child",
"Don't Explain", "Lady Sings The Blues", "Fine And Mellow" and
"Stormy Blues".
“The difficult I can do today. The
impossible will take a little longer.”
“If I'm going to sing like someone
else, then I don't need to sing at all.”
“You can't copy anybody and end
with anything. If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling.
No two people on earth are alike, and it's got to be that way in music
or it isn't music.”
Discography
Studio Recordings
Box Sets
• Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday On Columbia (1933-1944),
Columbia Legacy CXK85470, 2001
• The Complete Commodore Recordings (1939, 1944)
• The Complete Original American Decca Recordings (1944-1950)
• The Complete Billie Holiday On Verve (1945-1959)
Studio Albums
• Lady In Satin (Columbia, 1958)
• New Orleans: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1946)
(Giants of Jazz, 1983)
• The Sound Of Jazz (Columbia, 1958)
Live recordings
• At Monterey 1958 (1958)
• Billie Holiday In Europe 1954-1958 (1954-1958)
• The Complete 1951 Storyville Club Sessions (1951)
• Ella Fitzgerald And Billie Holiday At Newport (1957)
• Lady Day: The Storyville Concerts [Vol. 1 and 2]
(1951, 1953, 1959)
• A Midsummer Night's Jazz At Stratford '57 (1957)
• Summer of '49 (1948-1949)
The Verve box set includes the following live recordings:
• Jazz At The Philharmonic Performances (1945-1947)
• Jazz Club USA (1954)
• 1956 Carnegie Hall Concerts, with a narrator reading portions of her
autobiography, Lady Sings The Blues
• 1957 Newport Jazz Festival
• Seven Ages Of Jazz Festival (1958)
Videography
• Symphony In Black, 1935 short (with Duke Ellington)
• New Orleans, 1947
• The Sound Of Jazz, CBS Television, December 8, 1957
For more info about Billie Holiday, please, see:
• www.billie-holiday.net
• Billie Holiday at cmgww
• Billie Holiday at WikipediA
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