Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
|
Loading... Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth (edition 2016)by John Szwed (Author)
Work InformationBillie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth by John Szwed
   No current Talk conversations about this book.  alanteder | Feb 26, 2022 |    ) AntonioPaola | Jan 27, 2018 |
Unsatisfied with labeling Holiday "the greatest jazz singer of all time," veteran jazz biographer Szwed (Alan Lomax) attempts to deconstruct the entertainer and her vocal magic by puncturing her celebrated public image and her legendary performances....The book really takes off when Szwed gets into Holiday's peerless styling as an improviser and interpreter of torch songs and blues, including the classics "God Bless' the Child," "Don't Explain," and "My Man." Szwed provides an alternative to the gossip and scandal usually associated with Holiday with this highly entertaining, essential take on an truly American original. An anthropologist and onetime jazz musician who has taught at Columbia and Yale, Szwed is best known for his biographies of Miles Davis and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, who traveled the country recording folk music. Szwed’s book on Holiday is a series of essays that does not purport to be a biographical chronicle or even a coherent narrative....The most interesting sections of this diffuse and poorly conceived book are two chapters in which Szwed analyzes Holiday’s singing style. “Billie Holiday’s voice is odd,” he writes, “indelibly odd, and so easy to recognize, but so difficult to describe.” He shows how Holiday emphasized certain notes and words, how she deliberately lagged behind the beat as she sang, and how she took improvisational liberties with melody and meter. Her singing may not have been acrobatic, but it was original, subtle and deeply communicative....Szwed examines some of Holiday’s better-known songs and her history with various record labels, but his style is heavy going for anyone who isn’t a specialist or a Holiday fanatic....In the end, like so many others, he fails to solve the mystery of Lady Day. For all the drama in her life and the magic in her music, Billie Holiday remains elusive and alluring, just beyond the reach of words. To the public, Billie Holiday might simply be an icon. But to specialists, she’s the subject of a long and unsettled argument. In the view of some critics, her art has often gotten short shrift compared with discussions over the tabloid particulars of her too-short life.... John Szwed’s swift, conversational and yet detail-rich new biography, Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth, communicates its artist-first priorities in the subtitle, and then makes good on them throughout.... There are also political ambiguities involved in narrating the choices of an African American artist who, as Davis noted, “worked primarily with the idiom of white popular song”. And then there are the difficulties of needing to describe one of the most famously indescribable – and inimitable – voices in all of jazz and pop-music history....Elsewhere, Szwed is on point when he describes Holiday “falling behind the beat, floating, breathing where it’s not expected, scooping up notes and then letting them fall”....a lot of fun can actually be had using Szwed as a listening partner. Go ahead and launch your streaming-music engine of choice and build a playlist with the tracks as Szwed considers them. Distinctions
"Drawing on a vast amount of new material that has surfaced in the last decade, ... jazz writer John Szwed considers how [Holiday's] life inflected her art, her influences, her uncanny voice and rhythmic genius, a number of her signature songs, and her legacy"--Amazon.com. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)782.42165092The arts Music Vocal music Secular Forms of vocal music Secular songs General principles and musical forms Song genres Jazz songsLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.72)
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Wikipedia in English (1)
2
Review of the Penguin Books paperback (2016) of the original Viking hardcover (2015)
February 2022 became a Billie Holiday discovery month for me, starting from when I first listened to the podcast Billie Was a Black Woman (2021), which was excellent on the present day inspiration and influence of the singer, but had very little biographical content. That led me to read the interview collection Billie Holiday: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (2019), her own autobiography Lady Sings the Blues 50th Anniversary Edition (orig. 1956) and now this combination biography and musical analysis book by John Szwed.
The Musician and the Myth is best read as an addendum to Holiday's autobiography as it is not a complete biography in itself. It does provide some excellent context and clarification about the censored passages in the 1956 book. These were primarily due to Hollywood lawyers and agents who threatened to sue if their clients names were left in the book. There were also passages about Holiday's bisexuality which were deemed to be too revealing for that era. It is actually somewhat surprising that a complete uncensored edition has not appeared in the present day, as Szwed is able to quote entire lengthy passages of the original censored content, so it presumably all exists in the vaults of the original publisher Viking (or those of whomever owns that imprint these days).
Szwed divides his material into a front half discussing the "myth" and then a very detailed back half on the "musician". The latter isn't a full sessionography, but it does provide quite a lot of information about which other bands and session musicians Holiday worked with over her career. It breaks this down into what are now the conventionally accepted 3 periods of Holiday's recordings: roughly the early Columbia (& associated labels) years of the 1930s, the middle Commodore & Decca recordings of the 1940s and finally the Verve recordings of the 1950's. Szwed makes a case that the final 2 recordings for Columbia constitute a 4th period in themselves, regardless of how brief. This is especially so for the controversial Lady in Satin (1958) with its mostly non-jazz string arrangements, yet which many listeners still regard as their favourite Holiday album.
Soundtrack
These were the main Billie Holiday albums that I was listening to while reading Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth:
1. Billie Holiday - 5 Original Albums A bargain priced 5 CD box set of 5 original LPs from 1956 to 1958 in mini-LP cardboard sleeves including original liner notes and session musician details.
Box set cover image sourced from Discogs.
2. Lady in Satin: The Centennial Edition (orig 1958/reissue 2015), the second last album in an extended 3 CD edition with previously unreleased tracks and takes. Released to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Billie Holiday's birth in 1915.
Disc image sourced from Discogs. (