Why Billie Holiday?

About the Band

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Billie Holiday, born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1915, was and most certainly on record remains the voice of Jazz. Apart from Louis Armstrong, and with possible exception of Sarah Vaughan, there has never been a jazz vocalist whose unique abilities have approached  those of Billie Holiday. Her timing, for example, was as impeccable as the  finest jazz instrumental players (many of whom she worked with during her career). She phrased in a definitely instrumental fashion, although her instrumental-like, horn-influenced singing never was less than music, distorting neither melodic line nor interfering  with the matchless way  in which she lived a lyric. The feeling she communicated through  a song, whether it be in live performance or on record, could be devastating, and very real.
 
At the time when Billie’s talent was emerging—during the early 1930s—it was fashionable often for black singers to  sound white, to appeal to a wider audience. Billie Holiday was always a black singer; curiously, she ended up probably appealing to white audiences. She had some of the basic earthiness, sexuality and real-life qualities that marked the best of Bessie Smith’s work. However, Holiday was not a blues singer per se, using comparatively few blues items in her repertoire. Yet everything she sang was tinged with a blues feel—even early pop banalities.
 
It is not surprising that  she could produce singing of such searing, gut-level quality. For Billie’s life story reads like something that  even the most cruelly inventive Hollywood scriptwriter could scarcely dredge up. Born of unmarried  teen-age parents, Sadie Fagan and Clarence Holiday, she was raped at 10, and went into prostitution a couple years later. Apart from experiencing more than a fair share of  racialist problems, she later sought solace in alcohol, marijuana, then finally heroine. She died in hospital under police guard, where she was incarcerated under what now seems to have been a trumped-up charge of narcotics possession. 

Stella and her quintet present the music of Billie Holiday. Shrouded in mystery as she was draped in fur, Billie was multi-faceted; she possessed a sensitivity and ability to make the songs she sang as personal as if she was singing them softly in your very own ear. Featuring some of the Bay Area’s finest Jazz musicians, Stella’s quintet brings back the electric and intimate feeling of seeing Lady Day live in a 1930’s Jazz Club. Drawing from some of Billie’s most recorded tunes such as, Blue Moon, Billie’s Blues, and Strange Fruit, to name a few, the band also revives some of the earlier and lesser known tunes she interpreted. Stories of Billie’s life and music are interspersed with the music. The Band features, Stella Heath highlighting the vocal style of Billie Holiday; Neil Fontano classic style piano virtuoso from Sonoma County; Jason Bellenkes rich and inventive on tenor saxophone and clarinet harkening back to Lester Young's soulful sound; Trevor Kinsel interchanging between upright bass and cornet; and the percussion legend Pete Lind on the drum kit.