Status
Available
Publication
New York : Viking, 2015.
Description
"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.
Media reviews
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
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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. Show Less
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
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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.
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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,
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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. Show Less
Awards
Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year (Nonfiction — 2015)