Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth, by John Szwed
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Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth, by John Szwed
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• Kirkus Best Books of 2015 selection for Biography •Published in celebration of Holiday’s centenary, the first biography to focus on the singer’s extraordinary musical talentWhen Billie Holiday stepped into Columbia’s studios in November 1933, it marked the beginning of what is arguably the most remarkable and influential career in twentieth-century popular music. Her voice weathered countless shifts in public taste, and new reincarnations of her continue to arrive, most recently in the form of singers like Amy Winehouse and Adele.Most of the writing on Holiday has focused on the tragic details of her life—her prostitution at the age of fourteen, her heroin addiction and alcoholism, her series of abusive relationships—or tried to correct the many fabrications of her autobiography. But now, Billie Holiday stays close to the music, to her performance style, and to the self she created and put into print, on record and on stage.Drawing on a vast amount of new material that has surfaced in the last decade, critically acclaimed jazz writer John Szwed considers how her life inflected her art, her influences, her uncanny voice and rhythmic genius, a number of her signature songs, and her legacy.
Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth, by John Szwed- Amazon Sales Rank: #633306 in Books
- Brand: Viking
- Published on: 2015-03-31
- Released on: 2015-03-31
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.30" h x .88" w x 6.30" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 240 pages
Review Praise for Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth“A concise and sharply focused critical biography. . . . Szwed is aware of the danger of the Holiday legend, and is determined to show that she was much more than an emotive performer blessed with a unique gift. Tracing her musical influences and analyzing her thoughtful vocal artistry, he makes the case that she is, if anything, underrated as a musician.” —The New Yorker “[Szwed] offers a portrait of Lady Day as artist and mythmaker rather than tragic victim. . . . As with the best of Holiday’s music, this elegant and perceptive study is restrained, nuanced, and masterfully carried out.” —Kirkus (starred review) “[This] illuminating account restores to the singer the dignity of a true artist, one who emerges from [Szwed’s] pages—and the records to which they drive you hungrily back—as a revolutionary. Holiday’s originality becomes clear when Szwed examines the ascendancy of black American singers . . . What the reader is left with is not Holiday’s familiar, ravaged private life but the triumph of a unique creative talent.” —Neil Spencer, The Observer “A book that goes beyond biography and looks into Holiday’s meaning and reception.” —Ben Ratliff, The New York Times “Revelatory. . . . A meta-biography, about the creation of Holiday’s public image in media of all sorts: print, television, movies, and, of course, her recordings, but with special attention to the composition of her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues.” —Richard Brody, TheNewYorker.com “Billie Holiday’s fabled personal crises, the struggles against chemical dependency, sexual abuse and racism, have long threatened to overshadow her Promethean stature as an artist. Now, on the centennial of her birth, John Szwed, a veteran biographer and jazz musician, seeks to redress this imbalance . . . . Mr. Szwed, the author of acclaimed studies of Miles Davis, Sun Ra and folklorist Alan Lomax, is at his best when excavating hidden stories behind some of the more durable pillars of the Holiday legend. . . . Mr. Szwed writes in a clear, assured style that is particularly revealing when limning the contours of Holiday’s musical world.” —David Freeland, The Wall Street Journal “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. . . . about as fine a centenary-year gift as anyone had a right to expect.” — Seth Colter Walls, The Guardian “A convention-defying biography to watch for.” —Vogue.com “Unsatisfied with labeling Holiday ‘the greatest jazz singer of all time,’ veteran jazz biographer Szwed attempts to deconstruct the entertainer and her vocal magic by puncturing her celebrated public image and her legendary performances. . . . Szwed provides an alternative to the gossip and scandal usually associated with Holiday with this highly entertaining, essential take on an truly American original.” —Publishers Weekly (Top 10 Music books of Spring 2015) “Szwed’s book offers a fresh attempt to understand and explain the nature and scope of Holiday’s achievement.” —Times Literary Supplement “A musicologist’s appreciation of the jazz singer . . . a marvel.” —Independent “Insightful, investigative . . . entertaining and illuminating . . . a wonderfully engaging and revealing look at the great Lady Day.” —The Scotsman “Szwed devotes most of his book to Holiday’s music and musicianship—comparing her singing style to contemporaries like Judy Garland and Marlene Dietrich—rather than her drug problems and other downbeat stories with which most people are already familiar.” —Billy Heller, The New York Post “[Szwed] is interested in the gap between Holiday’s public image and her artistic achievement. . . . [He] is excellent on Billie’s voice—variously called ‘sad, olive-toned, whisky-hued, lazy, feline, smoky, unsentimental, weird,’ he writes—and on her trademark techniques of ‘falling behind the beat, floating, breathing where it’s not expected, scooping up notes and then letting them fall.’ [Szwed] devotes ample space to the songs with which she is most closely identified. . . . A worthy addition to the bookshelf on this woman whose music has lost none of its enigmatic power.” —Tom Beer, Newsday “As iconic as Lady Day is, the woman, artist and her personality, her singular jazz artistry is shrouded in misconceptions. Szwed adroitly re-frames the dialogue in his economic and, ultimately vital, understanding of Holiday’s true musical achievements. . . . Lady Day’s real life as an artist, woman and innovator, is given her full musical due, finally.” —Lew Washington, The Huffington Post Praise for Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World "Factually tireless and fluently analytical, Szwed gamely corrals a great river of events, efforts, and discoveries into a straight-ahead portrait of an intrepid, culture-defining artist and humanist." —Booklist (Starred review) "Szwed is a sensitive interpreter of music. . . he is meticulous about the work, and makes a strong case for Lomax as a central figure in the history of American music." —The New Yorker "A keenly appreciative, enormously detailed new Lomax biography." —The New York Times "John Szwed has written a graceful and informative cradle-to-grave study that's a perfect marriage of author and subject." —Douglas Brinkley, Texas Monthly Praise for So What: The Life of Miles Davis "Szwed offers crisply detailed backstories to such masterpieces as Sketches of Spain, Round About Midnight and Miles Ahead. His prose has a musical pulse, and he highlights the most significant element of Davis's soul: 'he told every woman he became involved with that music always came first, before family, children, lovers, friends.' Davis's music has been called a 'divine disease,' and this in-depth study clarifies the nature of that compulsive, satisfying malady in a way that will enlighten listeners and musicians." —Publishers Weekly Praise for Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra "Szwed has produced a rare jazz biography--one that takes full account of the history that shaped the music and its central personalities. An anthropologist, historian and musicologist who teaches at Yale, Szwed brings an impressive array of skills to this job. He needs them all to track down a subject whose every word seems intended to protect him from scrutiny." —Brent Staples, The New York Times Book Review
About the Author John Szwed is Professor of Music and Director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University. As a jazz musician, he played professionally for more than a decade. He is the author of sixteen books, including So What: The Life of Miles Davis, Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra, and Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World.
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Most helpful customer reviews
33 of 34 people found the following review helpful. A fascinating look at one of the best singers of our time By sandyb A must-read not only for Billie Holiday fans, but for anyone with even a passing interest in musical history. Well-written and meticulously researched, the author, John Szwed––director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University––knows his stuff, and disabuses the oft-mistaken notion that Holiday was primarily a blues singer and not the masterful jazz singer that she actually was.He presents Holiday as an artist continually evolving, manipulating her voice and the musical notes she performed in a way that has rarely, if ever, been seen by any singer before or since. Rather than focusing on her tragic history, which by now is well-known, Szwed showcases her music instead, her raw talent, and the history of many of the songs she is best known for: 'Body and Soul', 'God Bless the Child', and 'Strange Fruit', among others. The story of 'Strange Fruit' in particular, a song about lynching during the Jim Crow era, is a fascinating read in its own right, particularly because Holiday first sang it publicly in 1939, decades before the Civil Rights movement.Published in conjunction with Miss Holiday's 100th birthday, this book deserves a wide readership, if only to correct some of the misunderstandings surrounding one of our national treasures. Highly recommended.
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful. very strong book By MAXIMILLIAN MUHAMMAD this is one of those books that once you start reading you ain't gonna put it down. she truly lead a full life as a artist and in light of what is going down now Strange Fruit really hits home even more so now and she did this pre civil rights movement. a voice and instrument that changed the landscape of music and she inspired a whose who period. this book breaks it all down,racially,sexually and politics and the whole nine. a must read.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful. A fresh approach to the life and music of Billie Holiday By SShaw Billie Holiday inspired countless singers and hobnobbed with the likes of Miles Davis, and Orson Welles and even spent an evening on the town with Frank Sinatra, who later claimed she had helped him in his own career with her advice. Nevertheless, Holiday remains an elusive figure, full of contradictions, whose own autobiography was less a work of fact than a story based on true events. In an effort to get at the true Billie Holiday, Szwed approaches her life as it was, accepting the choices and influences that helped make up who she was and focusing on the symbiotic nature of the music that wove throughout her life, binding it together in a way no other influence could. Szwed seeks to dispel the myth that all of her life was a tragedy that chose her songs for her and instead argues that she chose the songs she did because they spoke to her emotionally. Szwed also analyzes the way that Holiday imbues her music with a part of herself, while at the same time keeping her singing a performance. In essence, stating that while Holiday emotionally connected to the songs that she sung, she was at the same time portraying a stage personality for the audience, not necessarily her personal life. It was this gift that allowed her to sing a song different ways each time, while at the same time making the audience believe she was telling her personal story to them each time. Szwed clearly knows his subject and expertly alludes to other works written about Holiday, comparing and contrasting the different views they presented. By incorporating an in-depth analysis of the musical style and songs of Holiday into the account of her life, Szwed provides a fresh perspective to Holiday’s life. Szwed’s writing is clear and where jazz jargon is introduced, he often makes an effort to define it for the layperson’s benefit. However, the work will likely appeal most to those readers with a prior interest in jazz or musical history due to the depth of analysis and musical criticism it contains.Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
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