Billie Holiday
Hugh Bell's searingly candid shot of the redoubtable Billie Holiday was taken backstage at Carnegie Hall in the late 50's. Bell captured the visual truth of Lady Day's dissolution her forearms, swollen and scarred from heroin and alcohol abuse; her toughness, her falling dress, which she seems oblivious to. Indeed, at the point in her decline, the singer often referred to as the best stylist jazz has ever produced was only a few years away from a premature death. She sometimes complained that much of her later audiences came to her concerts to see if she was going to "fall in the orchestra pit."
Thanks to her sensationalistic memoir and a popular 70s movie starring Diana Ross, even the non-jazz public is familiar with the pathos that marked Holiday's life.Born to unwed teenage parents, she was neglected and abandoned as a child, and abused by men as an adult. The true aficionado, however, cherishes Billie Holiday for her vocal virtuosity, the best of which was recorded with Teddy Wilson's band between 1936 and 1942. While other singers of her generation possessed "prettier" voices - often formally trained and technically pure - no other singer interpreted lyrics and melody as Holiday did. According to critic James Lincoln Collier, what gave Lady's style its singularity was her ability to lift the melody away from the beat, as opposed to landing on it - and balancing her vocal delivery with a son's theme. Listen to "What A Little Moonlight Can Do" for a master class in jazz vocalization. An excellent arranger as well, Billie Holiday also composed the modern classics, "Don't Explain" and "God Bless the Child."
Shortly before Billie Holiday died at the age of forty-four in 1959, Miles Davis discussed Lady's talents with a critic. He remarked that her voice had become deeper and darker and gained more control with maturity. Indeed, the voice the audience heard the night this picture was taken was not, as one musician-writer wrote, "the insufferable croakings of a woman already half dead," but "recitatives whose dramatic intensity becomes unbearable statements as frank and tragic as anything throughout the whole range of popular art".