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Harlepolis...Billie's Here Great pic of Billie Holiday...
...on the cover of this month's JazzTimes. Billie Holiday: A Portrait in Testimony An Excerpt from the May 2005 issue 
Billie Holiday would have turned 90 years old on April 7. But due to a hard life, abetted by even harder living, Holiday died on July 17, 1959, ravaged by heart and liver disease. She was 44. Still, in her short time, Lady Day created a musical legacy that places her not only in the pantheon of important singers but also among the greatest jazz artists. Linda Kuehl was an aspiring writer obsessed with Billie Holiday. She compiled information for many years for a biography, collecting everything from photographs and police files to private letters and personal testimonies from Holiday's friends, family and peers. Yet like her obsession, Kuehl wouldn't live very long. Little is known about what precipitated the event, but Kuehl took her own life in 1979 by leaping off the ledge of her third-story hotel room in Washington, D.C. Kuehl had spent most of the 1970s trying to wrangle all her research into book form, but she never got past writing and rewriting and rejecting a handful of chapters. Her family held on to the boxes upon boxes of interviews, manuscripts and documents Kuehl accumulated until the 1990s, when they sold the work to jazz historian and producer Toby Byron. Some of Kuehl's taped interviews are featured on Byron's production Billie Holiday: The Ultimate Collection (Hip-O Select), a nonlinear, interactive look at the singer's life and music using audio, video, text and photos, spread across two CDs and a DVD. Another project that uses these long-lost archives is Julia Blackburn's With Billie (Pantheon), which was meant to be a traditional biography of Holiday but changed into something wholly different as the author tried to sort through the enormous and often disorganized jumble of notes and data that Kuehl left behind. The book is a sometimes awkward blend of first-person accounts mixed with contextualizing information from Blackburn, but there's no denying that Kuehl's interviews and diligent work elicited huge amounts of information. It's from the Kuehl archives and With Billie that these testimonies to Holiday-good and bad, from friends and musicians-are taken. The Girl Mary "Pony" Kane She used to sing in nightclubs and maybe make two or three dollars a night. She'd be singing "Stormy Weather" and "Stardust" and all those popular tunes. She sang fast and slow numbers. There used to be an after-hours place called Pitts on Caroline Street (in Baltimore), where a man would play piano, and everybody would pile in there at nights and she would be the big attraction... Continued in the May 2005 issue http://www.jazztimes.com/...e_id=15610 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= tA  Tribal Disorder
http://www.soundclick.com...rmusic.htm "Ya see, we're not interested in what you know...but what you are willing to learn. C'mon y'all." | |
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theAudience said: Great pic of Billie Holiday...
...on the cover of this month's JazzTimes. Billie Holiday: A Portrait in Testimony An Excerpt from the May 2005 issue
Billie Holiday would have turned 90 years old on April 7. But due to a hard life, abetted by even harder living, Holiday died on July 17, 1959, ravaged by heart and liver disease. She was 44. Still, in her short time, Lady Day created a musical legacy that places her not only in the pantheon of important singers but also among the greatest jazz artists. Linda Kuehl was an aspiring writer obsessed with Billie Holiday. She compiled information for many years for a biography, collecting everything from photographs and police files to private letters and personal testimonies from Holiday's friends, family and peers. Yet like her obsession, Kuehl wouldn't live very long. Little is known about what precipitated the event, but Kuehl took her own life in 1979 by leaping off the ledge of her third-story hotel room in Washington, D.C. Kuehl had spent most of the 1970s trying to wrangle all her research into book form, but she never got past writing and rewriting and rejecting a handful of chapters. Her family held on to the boxes upon boxes of interviews, manuscripts and documents Kuehl accumulated until the 1990s, when they sold the work to jazz historian and producer Toby Byron. Some of Kuehl's taped interviews are featured on Byron's production Billie Holiday: The Ultimate Collection (Hip-O Select), a nonlinear, interactive look at the singer's life and music using audio, video, text and photos, spread across two CDs and a DVD. Another project that uses these long-lost archives is Julia Blackburn's With Billie (Pantheon), which was meant to be a traditional biography of Holiday but changed into something wholly different as the author tried to sort through the enormous and often disorganized jumble of notes and data that Kuehl left behind. The book is a sometimes awkward blend of first-person accounts mixed with contextualizing information from Blackburn, but there's no denying that Kuehl's interviews and diligent work elicited huge amounts of information. It's from the Kuehl archives and With Billie that these testimonies to Holiday-good and bad, from friends and musicians-are taken. The Girl Mary "Pony" Kane She used to sing in nightclubs and maybe make two or three dollars a night. She'd be singing "Stormy Weather" and "Stardust" and all those popular tunes. She sang fast and slow numbers. There used to be an after-hours place called Pitts on Caroline Street (in Baltimore), where a man would play piano, and everybody would pile in there at nights and she would be the big attraction... Continued in the May 2005 issue http://www.jazztimes.com/...e_id=15610 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= tA Tribal Disorder
http://www.soundclick.com...rmusic.htm Yep, I saw that cover in Tower. Nice thread. SynthiaRose said "I'm in love with blackguitaristz. Especially when he talks about Hendrix."
nammie "What BGZ says I believe. I have the biggest crush on him." http://ccoshea19.googlepa...ssanctuary http://ccoshea19.googlepages.com | |
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blackguitaristz said: Yep, I saw that cover in Tower. Nice thread.
Thanks. There's also a good article/interview with Meshell Ndegeocello about Dance of the Infidel. 
A few excerpts... It doesn't hurt that Ndegeocello's amorous rhapsodies often rival those of Prince in terms of salaciousness, and she can thump a mean electric bass as well, adding to her girls-kick-ass appeal. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Even for someone like Ndegeocello, who challenged the status quo with songs like "Leviticus: Faggot" and "God.Fear.Money," her new disc is a chancey venture given the R&B/hip hop audience's impatience for instrumental music. "Right now I have nothing [verbal] to say," Ndegeocello says. "What I feel, I can express a lot better in instrumental music." - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The most enthralling vocal performance, however, appears at the end with Hathaway, whose alto gives a hymnlike rendition of Walter Bullock and Richard Whiting's "When Did You Leave Heaven?" Hathaway's mesmerizing croons, nuzzled inside Neal Evans' misty piano and Cain's keyboard drones, makes you thankful just to be alive to hear it. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - "Improvisational music has always been something I've gravitated toward," Ndegeocello says. "I'm having a great experience; I guess this is where I need to be for now." =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= And this sidebar relating to our recent Bitches Brew conversation... "Electric-era Miles is one of the things the Lincoln Center jazz revisionists have tried to erase along with late John Coltrane." ~Henry Kaiser (guitarist) This is a zinger probably aimed directly at Wynton Marsalis. 
tA Tribal Disorder
http://www.soundclick.com...rmusic.htm "Ya see, we're not interested in what you know...but what you are willing to learn. C'mon y'all." | |
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Good lookin' out, chile
I order the book "With Billie". Another book that article failed to mention which exclusivley used Linda's archieves is Donald Clarke's "Wishing On The Moon: The Life & Times Of Billie Holiday" which I advice everybody to pick. Here're 2 incomplete clips that could give ya'll an idea about why I TOO am obsessed with Lady Day(save target as): http://waynesweb.ualr.edu...0Sachmo.rm http://waynesweb.ualr.edu...20Fruit.rm 
Oh, and ya'll? Please be good and buy this sucka,,, 
It includes: Billie's infamous radio interview with Mike Wallace Billie's reharsel song of "Jeepers Creepers"(Its weird hearing her cuss lol) Linda's interviews with Billy Eckstine, Jo Jones, Roy Eldridge, john Hammond and handful of others. Not to mention couple of REAL good videos of her(including her infamous Sound Of Jazz pre4mance of "Fine & Mellow" with Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Roy Eldridge and others). [Edited 4/29/05 12:13pm] | |
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Nice photos.
 Wait a minute,...
...  he's grabbing her breastisis!
tA Tribal Disorder
http://www.soundclick.com...rmusic.htm "Ya see, we're not interested in what you know...but what you are willing to learn. C'mon y'all." | |
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No shit, Sherlock  | |
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