Newport Jazz Festival. The Legends - Billie Holiday

Founded in 1954, the Newport Jazz Festival was the first annual jazz festival in America. It has been host to numerous legendary performances by some of the world's leading established and emerging artists. Historic moments since its inception include performances by Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane and Miles Davis. Referred to as the grandfather of all jazz festivals, the event draws thousands of people from all over the world to Newport, Rhode Island, a city, which is famed for its spectacular coastal scenery and awe-inspiring architecture.

Most of the early festivals were broadcast on Voice of America radio and many performances were recorded and have been issued by various record labels.

The Newport Jazz Festival moved to New York City in 1972 and became a two-site festival in 1981 when it returned to Newport and also continued in New York. The festival was known as the JVC Jazz Festival from 1984 to 2008.

Two of the most famous performances in the festival's history are Miles Davis’s 1955 solo on “Round Midnight” and the Duke Ellington Orchestra's lengthy 1956 performance of "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue".

The 1957 performances of Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Carmen McRea were released in 1958 on the album Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday at Newport.

The Legends - Part Eight

Billie Holiday

Billie Holiday ("Lady Day") is considered by many to be the greatest of all jazz singers. In a tragically abbreviated singing career that lasted less than three decades, her evocative phrasing and poignant delivery profoundly influenced vocalists who followed her. Although her warm, feathery voice inhabited a limited range, she used it like an accomplished jazz instrumentalist, stretching and condensing phrases in an ever-shifting dialogue with accompanying musicians. Famous for delivering lyrics a bit behind the beat, she alternately endowed them with sadness, sensuality, languor, and irony. Rarely singing blues, Holiday performed mostly popular material, communicating deep emotion by stripping down rather than dressing up words and lines. "If you find a tune that's got something to do with you, you just feel it, and when you sing it, other people feel it, too," Holiday once explained. White gardenias, worn in her hair, became her trademark.

Born Eleanora Fagan on April 7, 1915, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her life was a study in hardship. Her parents married when she was three, but her musician father was seldom present and the couple soon divorced. Receiving little schooling as a child, Holiday scrubbed floors and ran errands for a nearby brothel so she could listen to idols Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith on the Victrola in its parlor. Brutally raped at ten, she was sent to a reformatory for "seducing" her adult attacker; at fourteen she was jailed for prostitution.

In her difficult early life, Holiday found solace in music, singing along to the records of Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong. She followed her mother who had moved to New York City in the late 1920s and worked in a house of prostitution in Harlem for a time. Around 1930, Holiday began singing in local clubs and renamed herself "Billie" after the film star Billie Dove.

At the age of 18, Holiday was discovered by producer John Hammond while she was performing in a Harlem jazz club. Hammond was instrumental in getting Holiday recording work with an up-and-coming clarinetist and bandleader Benny Goodman. With Goodman, she sang vocals for several tracks, including her first commercial release "Your Mother's Son-In-Law" and the 1934 top ten hit "Riffin' the Scotch."

Around this time, Holiday met and befriended saxophonist Lester Young, who was part of Count Basie’s orchestra on and off for years. He even lived with Holiday and her mother Sadie for a while. Young gave Holiday the nickname "Lady Day" in 1937 - the same year she joined Basie's band.

By the mid-1940s Billie had been arrested many times for narcotics violations, and after one arrest in 1947, at her own request, was placed for a year and a day in a federal rehabilitation center. Just ten days after being released she gave a concert at Carnegie Hall, but thenceforth was barred by New York City police licensing laws from working in any place that served liquor. The absence of a cabaret card in effect meant that she could never again appear in a New York nightclub.

Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald

Billie made her final public appearance in a concert at the Phoenix Theatre, New York City, on May 25, 1959. In early 1959 she found out that she had cirrhosis of the liver. The doctor told her to stop drinking, which she did for a short time, but soon returned to heavy drinking. By May she had lost twenty pounds. On May 31, 1959, Holiday was taken to Metropolitan Hospital in New York suffering from liver and heart disease. She was arrested for drug possession as she lay dying, and her hospital room was raided by authorities. Police officers were stationed at the door to her room. Holiday remained under police guard at the hospital until she died on July 17, 1959. In the final years of her life, she had been progressively swindled out of her earnings, and she died with $0.70 in the bank and $750 (a tabloid fee) on her person.

Billie Holiday was posthumously inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Four of her albums were awarded to the Grammy Award for Best Historical Album.

Here is my top 10 of Lady Day's songs:

1.   "Body And Soul"

2.   "I Love You Porgy"

3.   "Blu Moon"

4.   "The Man I Love"

5.   "I'm A Fool To Want You"

6.   "My Man"

7.   "Georgia On My Mind"

8.   "Solitude"

9.   "The Blues Are Brewin" (with Louis Armstrong) 

10. "All Of Me"