Artist: Billie Holliday: mp3 download Genre(s): Jazz Chanson Billie Holliday's discography: The Chronogical 1939-1940 Year: 1991 Tracks: 22 The Essential Billie Holliday - The Carnegie Hall Concert Year: Tracks: 18 The Diva Series Year: Tracks: 16 The first class honours point democratic jazz isaac Bashevis Singer to be active audiences with the acute, personal touch of classic blues, Billie Holiday changed the art of American pop vocals forever. Almost l prospicient time later on her death, it's difficult to believe that prior to her egression, wind and pop singers were tied to the Tin Pan Alley tradition and rarely individualised their songs; only blues singers wish Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey actually gave the impression they had lived through what they were telling. Billie Holiday's highly conventionalized reading of this blues custom revolutionized traditional pop, ripping the decades-long tradition of sung dynasty plugging in deuce by refusing to compromise her art for either the call or the band. She made clear her debts to Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong (in her autobiography she admitted, "I always treasured Bessie's big good for you and Pops' touch sense"), merely in verity her style was near her own, quite a a electrical shock in an geezerhood of exchangeable crooners and striation singers. With her purport sheeny through on every recording, Holiday's technological expertness likewise excelled in compare to the great majority of her generation. Often world-weary by the tired old Tin Pan Alley songs she was forced to record early in her life history, Holiday fooled around with the beat and the melody, verbiage behind the beat and often rejuvenating the standard line with harmonies borrowed from her favorite trumpet players, Armstrong and Lester Young. (She often aforesaid she tried to sing like a horn.) Her notorious individual life -- a series of abusive relationships, meaning addictions, and periods of imprint -- doubtless aided her legendary condition, just Holiday's topper performances ("Fan Man," "Don't Explain," "Unknown Fruit," her possess constitution "God Bless the Child") remain among the most sensitive and established vocal performances always recorded. More than technological ability, more than honour of vocalisation, what made Billie Holiday one of the best vocalists of the hundred -- easily the equal of Ella Fitzgerald or Frank Sinatra -- was her relentlessly individualist temperament, a caliber that coloured every one of her endlessly nuanced performances. Billie Holiday's chaotic living reportedly began in Baltimore on April 7, 1915 (a few reports say 1912) when she was innate Eleanora Fagan Gough. Her father, Clarence Holiday, was a adolescent malarky guitarist and banjo player later to play in Fletcher Henderson's Orchestra. He never married her mother, Sadie Fagan, and left spell his daughter was still a baby. (She would later run into him in New York, and though she contracted many guitarists for her roger Sessions before his death in 1937, she always avoided exploitation him.) Holiday's mother was likewise a whitney Moore Young Jr. teen at the time, and whether because of rawness or neglect, oft left her girl with thoughtless relatives. Holiday was sentenced to Catholic reform school at the historic period of ten, reportedly after she admitted being ravaged. Though sentenced to stay until she became an adult, a family line friend helped get her released after just now two eld. With her mother, she stirred in 1927, low gear to New Jersey and soon after to Brooklyn. In New York, Holiday helped her mother with domestic work, only presently began moonlighting as a woman of the street for the additional income. According to the corpulent Billie Holiday caption (which gained extra credenza after her notoriously apocryphal autobiography Lady Sings the Blues), her big telling break came in 1933 when a comic terpsichore tryout at a speakeasy prompted her accompanist to ask her if she could sing. In fact, Holiday was about likely telling at clubs all over New York City as early as 1930-31. Whatever the dependable chronicle, she low gear gained some publicity in early 1933, when record manufacturer John Hammond -- only trey days older than Holiday herself, and just at the beginning of a fabled life history -- wrote her up in a pillar for Melody Maker and brought Benny Goodman to one of her performances. After recording a demonstration at Columbia Studios, Holiday coupled a small group lED by Goodman to make her commercial debut on November 27, 1933 with "Your Mother's Son-In-Law." Though she didn't reelect to the studio for over a year, Billie Holiday washed-out 1934 moving up the rungs of the competitive 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 final half of 1935, Holiday last entered the studio once more and recorded a number of four sessions. With a pick up ring supervised by piano player Teddy Wilson, she recorded a series of obscure, forgettable songs uncoiled from the gutters of Tin Pan Alley -- in other words, the only songs usable to an unsung black band during the mid-'30s. (During the swing era, music publishers unbroken the best songs strictly in the men of companionship orchestras and popular white singers.) Despite the poor birdsong calibre, Holiday and assorted groups (including herald Roy Eldridge, contralto Johnny Hodges, and tenors Ben Webster and Chu Berry) energized compressed songs like "What a Little Moonlight Can Do," "XXIV Hours a Day" and "If You Were Mine" (to read goose egg of "Eeny Meeny Miney Mo" and "Yankee Doodle Never Went to Town"). The great jazz group playacting and Holiday's increasingly assured vocals made them quite popular on Columbia, Brunswick and Vocalion. During 1936, Holiday toured with groups light-emitting diode by Jimmie Lunceford and Fletcher Henderson, and so returned to New York for several more roger Sessions. In late January 1937, she recorded several numbers with a small group culled from 1 of Hammond's new discoveries, Count Basie's Orchestra. Tenor Lester Young, who'd briefly known Billie several age in the beginning, and herald Buck Clayton were to become specially attached to Holiday. The ternion did much of their c. H. Best recorded work together during the late '30s, and Holiday herself bestowed the nickname Pres on Young, spell 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 singer, Jimmy Rushing. The tie lasted less than a year, however. Though officially she was dismissed from the ring for organism erratic and undependable, vague influences higher up in the publishing populace reportedly commanded the action after she refused to begin singing '20s female blues standards. At least temporarily, the move actually benefited Holiday -- less than a month after going away Basie, she was hired by Artie Shaw's popular banding. She began singing with the radical in 1938, one of the low gear instances of a black distaff coming into court with a ovalbumin grouping. Despite the continuing accompaniment of the entire band, all the same, demonstrate promoters and wireless sponsors before long began objecting to Holiday -- based on her unorthodox singing style about as much as her race. After a series of escalating indignities, Holiday step down the banding in revolt. Yet once more, her opinion proved valuable; the added freedom allowed her to take a fishgig at a articulatio coxae new guild named LC220% Society, the start popular nox club with an interracial audience. There, Billie Holiday erudite the song that would trebucket her life history to a new tier: "Unknown Fruit." The measure, written by Café Society even Lewis Allen and forever laced to Holiday, is an anguished reprisal of the intense racial discrimination still persistent in the South. Though Holiday initially explicit doubts about adding such a denudate, uncompromising song to her repertory, she pulled it off thanks largely to her powers of shade and subtlety. "Unknown Fruit" presently became the highlight of her performances. Though John Hammond refused to record it (not for its politics but for its excessively biting imaging), he allowed Holiday a piece of leverage to record for Commodore, the tag owned by jazz record-store owner Milt Gabler. Once released, "Strange Fruit" was banned by many radio outlets, though the maturation nickelodeon manufacture (and the comprehension of the first-class "Ok and Mellow" on the flip) made it a sooner large, though controversial, hit. She continued recording for Columbia labels until 1942, and hit big once more with her most celebrated paper, 1941's "God Bless the Child." Gabler, wHO also worked A&R for Decca, sign-language her to the label in 1944 to record "Lover Man," a song written especially for her and her third big hit. Neatly side-stepping the musician's mating bAN that afflicted her former label, Holiday before long became a precedency at Decca, earning the right to top-grade material and lavish string sections for her roger Huntington Sessions. She continued recording scattered sessions for Decca during the rest of the '40s, and recorded several of her favorite songs including Bessie Smith's "'Tain't Nobody's Business If I Do," "Them There Eyes," and "Crazy He Calls Me." Though her prowess was at its peak, Billie Holiday's worked up life began a turbulent period during the mid-'40s. Already heavily into alcohol and ganja, she began smoking opium early in the decennary with her number one hubby, Johnnie Monroe. The marriage didn't net, but hot on its heels came a s marriage ceremony to cornetist Joe Guy and a move to diacetylmorphine. Despite her victorious concert at New York's Town Hall and a small plastic film part -- as a maiden (!) -- with Louis Armstrong in 1947's New Orleans, she lost a good deal of money running her possess orchestra with Joe Guy. Her mother's dying before long subsequently affected her profoundly, and in 1947 she was arrested for self-control of diacetylmorphine and sentenced to octet months in prison. Unluckily, Holiday's troubles only continued subsequently her loss. The do drugs charge made it insufferable for her to get a nightclub circuit card, so night club performances were extinct of the question. Plagued by various renown hawks from all portions of the netherworld (malarky, drugs, song publishing, etc.), she soldiered on for Decca until 1950. Two age later, she began recording for jazz entrepreneur Norman Granz, possessor of the splendid labels Clef, Norgran, and by 1956, Verve. The recordings returned her to the small-group affaire of her Columbia work on, and reunited her with Ben Webster as well as other top-flight musicians such as Oscar Peterson, Harry "Sweets" Edison, and Charlie Shavers. Though the ravages of a hard life were beginning to take their toll on her vocalisation, many of Holiday's mid-'50s recordings ar just as intense and beautiful as her classic ferment. During 1954, Holiday toured Europe to outstanding acclaim, and her 1956 autobiography brought her tied more renown (or ill fame). She made her net great show in 1957, on the CBS television system special The Sound of Jazz with Webster, Lester Young, and Coleman Hawkins providing a close funding. One year later, the Lady in Satin LP clothed her naked, increasingly gruff voice with the distraught strings of Ray Ellis. During her last year, she made two more appearances in Europe in front collapsing in May 1959 of centre and liver disease. Still procuring diacetylmorphine patch on her death bed, Holiday was arrested for possession in her private room and died on July 17, her system completely unable to fight both withdrawal method and spunk disease at the same clip. Her cult of influence spread quickly afterwards her end and gave her more celebrity than she'd enjoyed in living. The 1972 biopic Peeress Sings the Blues featured Diana Ross struggling to overcome the conflicting myths of Holiday's life, merely the photographic film likewise illuminated her tragic living and introduced many future fans. By the digital age, well-nigh all of Holiday's recorded material had been reissued: by Columbia (nine-spot volumes of The Quintessential Billie Holiday), Decca (The Complete Decca Recordings), and Verve (The Complete Billie Holiday on Verve 1945-1959). |
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