Billie Holiday

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风格: #摇摆乐　#传统流行　#人声爵士　#爵士
地区: United States of America 美国

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Billie Holiday一直都是最有名的爵士乐女歌手，甚至在她逝世40年后，还是如此。 “Lady Day”（Lester Young这样称呼她）有一副音量不高而且也不吵杂的嗓音，但她的创新意识却使她在音乐界具有很大的影响力。她将自己的感情融入她所演唱的歌曲中（尤其是在她演唱生涯的后半期），这给人留下了深刻的印象，有些时候她的全身心投入甚至会让人感到震惊。她有时的确生活在她所演唱歌曲的世界里。她的原名和出生地很长一段时间里都被搞错了，但感谢Donald ClarkMoon上找到了Billie Holiday的权威性的生平介绍，我们才能准确写下她的名字。

Holiday的早年生活充满了传奇色彩，这要归咎与她离奇的自传Lady Sings the Blues，但说她的生活不稳定却并不

过分。她的父亲Clarence Holiday (他从未娶过Billie的母亲)曾和Fletcher Henderson一起演奏吉他。他很早就抛弃了他的家庭，而她母亲也不是一个好的典范。Billie在很大程度上说是独自一人长大的，没人爱和终身自卑的感觉一直缠绕着她，

这也导致她一生中都勇于冒险以及渐渐变得有些自我破坏欲。

Holiday因在Harlem club演唱而被John Hammod发现后，生活有了改善。他安排Holiday在1993年与Benny Goodman合作录制了几首歌，虽然并未获得怎样的成功但却标志着Holiday已经开始了自己的事业。两年以后Holiday与Teddy Wilson领导的乐队走到了一起。在1935年~1942年期间，她推出了她演唱生涯最好的几张唱片。此时她的表演带有很大的爵士乐风格，她融合了Louis Armstrong的旋转和Bessie Smith的声音，结果便形成了她全新的风格。在1937年，Lester Young和Buck Clayton都开始邀请Holiday与他们合作录制唱片，此后在这三人之间产生了无休无尽的相互影响。

Lady Day在1937年曾与Count Basie*s Orchestra合作，但因为双方属于不同的唱片公司，他们的合作成果仅包括三首在电台播放的歌曲。在1938年Holiday又与Artie Shaw Orchestra合作了一段时间，但存在同样的问题（他们仅合作录制了一首歌），而且她还不得不处理面临的种族问题，不仅在她的Southern旅行演出中，在New York她也遇到了同样的问题。1939年在Café Society的一段时间里，Holiday的星路有所升温。在那一年Holiday以一曲恐怖独特Strange Fruit（也被认为是反种族问题的宣言）给世人留下了深刻的印象。这一歌曲也成了她表演的保留节目。她1940——1942年的唱片让人们更多体会到的是，与以前相比，她“扮演”了举足轻重的配唱角色。

虽然Holiday的演唱不如以前那样充满爵士乐风格，但在1944年——1949年期间，她的声音却是最强有力的。她已经推出了Fine and Mellow (1939)和God Bless the Child (1941)，但却是在Decca中才产生了她最有影响力的歌曲Lover Man，以及Don*t Explain, Good Morning和她翻唱的歌曲Ain*t Nobody*s Business If I Do, Them There Eyes, Crazy He Calls Me。然而不幸的是，在专集发行之前她就已经染上了海洛因，1947年的大部分时间里她是在监狱里度过的。但由于她的知名程度，她成了一个反面的“杰出人物”，听众的数量反而激增。在1946年Lady Day有机会在Hollywood的电影New Orleans中演出，虽然对自己仅在剧中表演一个女仆而感到沮丧，但Holiday还是与她以前的偶像Louis Armstrong在剧中进行了合作。

1950年以后Billie开始走下坡路，虽然她在Norman Granz公司（成立于1952年）的唱片使她重新成为爵士乐全明星组合中的一员（其他人包括Charlie Shavers, Buddy DeFranco, Harry “Sweets”Edison和Ben Webster），但是她的音质下滑很快。她的不愉快的个人生活使她感到沮丧，而且她继续吸食海洛因和酗酒，到1956年她已经失去了一流音乐人的位置。在1957年Holiday释放了她的最后一颗卫星——在The Sound of Jazz电视广播中演唱了单曲Fine and Mellow（参加者还包括Lester Young, Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, Gerry Mulligan和Roy Eldridge），但结束的日子似乎已经近了。在1958年Holiday推出了专集Lady in Saint。然而在接下来的一年中这位歌手终于倒下了，在她生命最后的“篇章”里，她在病床上因被发现私自窝藏海洛而被捕。值得庆幸的是，Holiday的唱片在她去世后又受到了人们比她在世时更狂热的喜好，几乎她所有的歌曲都制成了CD。《The Complete Billie Holiday on Verve,1945-1959 Box Set》为系列专辑，共10CD，由Wynton Kelly，Tony Scott，Jo Jones，Billie Holiday，Lester Young 共同完成.

The first popular jazz singer to move audiences with the intense, personal feeling of classic blues, Billie Holiday changed the art of American pop vocals forever. Almost fifty years after her death, it's difficult to believe that prior to her emergence, jazz and pop singers were tied to the Tin Pan Alley tradition and rarely personalized their songs; only blues singers like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey actually gave the impression they had lived through what they were singing. Billie Holiday's highly stylized reading of this blues tradition revolutionized traditional pop, ripping the decades-long tradition of song plugging in two by refusing to compromise her artistry for either the song or the band. She made clear her debts to Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong (in her autobiography she admitted, "I always wanted Bessie's big sound and Pops' feeling"), but in truth her style was virtually her own, quite a shock in an age of interchangeable crooners and band singers.

With her spirit shining through on every recording, Holiday's technical expertise also excelled in comparison to the great majority of her contemporaries. Often bored by the tired old Tin Pan Alley songs she was forced to record early in her career, Holiday fooled around with the beat and the melody, phrasing behind the beat and often rejuvenating the standard melody with harmonies borrowed from her favorite horn players, Armstrong and Lester Young. (She often said she tried to sing like a horn.) Her notorious private life — a series of abusive relationships, substance addictions, and periods of depression — undoubtedly assisted her legendary status, but Holiday's best performances ("Lover Man," "Don't Explain," "Strange Fruit," her own composition "God Bless the Child") remain among the most sensitive and accomplished vocal performances ever recorded. More than technical ability, more than purity of voice, what made Billie Holiday one of the best vocalists of the century — easily the equal of Ella Fitzgerald or Frank Sinatra — was her relentlessly individualist temperament, a quality that colored every one of her endlessly nuanced performances.

Billie Holiday's chaotic life reportedly began in Baltimore on April 7, 1915 (a few reports say 1912) when she was born Eleanora Fagan Gough. Her father, Clarence Holiday, was a teenaged jazz guitarist and banjo player later to play in Fletcher Henderson's Orchestra. He never married her mother, Sadie Fagan, and left while his daughter was still a baby. (She would later run into him in New York, and though she contracted many guitarists for her sessions before his death in 1937, she always avoided using him.) Holiday's mother was also a young teenager at the time, and whether because of inexperience or neglect, often left her daughter with uncaring relatives. Holiday was sentenced to Catholic reform school at the age of ten, reportedly after she admitted being raped. Though sentenced to stay until she became an adult, a family friend helped get her released after just two years. With her mother, she moved in 1927, first to New Jersey and soon after to Brooklyn.

In New York, Holiday helped her mother with domestic work, but soon began moonlighting as a prostitute for the additional income. According to the weighty Billie Holiday legend (which gained additional credence after her notoriously apocryphal autobiography Lady Sings the Blues), her big singing break came in 1933 when a laughable dancing audition at a speakeasy prompted her accompanist to ask her if she could sing. In fact, Holiday was most likely singing at clubs all over New York City as early as 1930-31. Whatever the true story, she first gained some publicity in early 1933, when record producer John Hammond — only three years older than Holiday herself, and just at the beginning of a legendary career — wrote her up in a column for Melody Maker and brought Benny Goodman to one of her performances. After recording a demo at Columbia Studios, Holiday joined a small group led by Goodman to make her commercial debut on November 27, 1933 with "Your Mother's Son-In-Law."

Though she didn't return to the studio for over a year, Billie Holiday spent 1934 moving up the rungs of the competitive New York bar scene. By early 1935, she made her debut at the Apollo Theater and appeared in a one-reeler film with Duke Ellington. During the last half of 1935, Holiday finally entered the studio again and recorded a total of four sessions. With a pick-up band supervised by pianist Teddy Wilson, she recorded a series of obscure, forgettable songs straight from the gutters of Tin Pan Alley — in other words, the only songs available to an obscure black band during the mid-'30s. (During the swing era, music publishers kept the best songs strictly in the hands of society orchestras and popular white singers.) Despite the poor song quality, Holiday and various groups (including trumpeter Roy Eldridge, alto Johnny Hodges, and tenors Ben Webster and Chu Berry) energized flat songs like "What a Little Moonlight Can Do," "Twenty-Four Hours a Day" and "If You Were Mine" (to say nothing of "Eeny Meeny Miney Mo" and "Yankee Doodle Never Went to Town"). The great combo playing and Holiday's increasingly assured vocals made them quite popular on Columbia, Brunswick and Vocalion.

During 1936, Holiday toured with groups led by Jimmie Lunceford and Fletcher Henderson, then returned to New York for several more sessions. In late January 1937, she recorded several numbers with a small group culled from one of Hammond's new discoveries, Count Basie's Orchestra. Tenor Lester Young, who'd briefly known Billie several years earlier, and trumpeter Buck Clayton were to become especially attached to Holiday. The three did much of their best recorded work together during the late '30s, and Holiday herself bestowed the nickname Pres on Young, while he dubbed her Lady Day for her elegance. By the spring of 1937, she began touring with Basie as the female complement to his male singer, Jimmy Rushing. The association lasted less than a year, however. Though officially she was fired from the band for being temperamental and unreliable, shadowy influences higher up in the publishing world reportedly commanded the action after she refused to begin singing '20s female blues standards.

At least temporarily, the move actually benefited Holiday — less than a month after leaving Basie, she was hired by Artie Shaw's popular band. She began singing with the group in 1938, one of the first instances of a black female appearing with a white group. Despite the continuing support of the entire band, however, show promoters and radio sponsors soon began objecting to Holiday — based on her unorthodox singing style almost as much as her race. After a series of escalating indignities, Holiday quit the band in disgust. Yet again, her judgment proved valuable; the added freedom allowed her to take a gig at a hip new club named Café Society, the first popular nightspot with an inter-racial audience. There, Billie Holiday learned the song that would catapult her career to a new level: "Strange Fruit."

The standard, written by Café Society regular Lewis Allen and forever tied to Holiday, is an anguished reprisal of the intense racism still persistent in the South. Though Holiday initially expressed doubts about adding such a bald, uncompromising song to her repertoire, she pulled it off thanks largely to her powers of nuance and subtlety. "Strange Fruit" soon became the highlight of her performances. Though John Hammond refused to record it (not for its politics but for its overly pungent imagery), he allowed Holiday a bit of leverage to record for Commodore, the label owned by jazz record-store owner Milt Gabler. Once released, "Strange Fruit" was banned by many radio outlets, though the growing jukebox industry (and the inclusion of the excellent "Fine and Mellow" on the flip) made it a rather large, though controversial, hit. She continued recording for Columbia labels until 1942, and hit big again with her most famous composition, 1941's "God Bless the Child." Gabler, who also worked A&R for Decca, signed her to the label in 1944 to record "Lover Man," a song written especially for her and her third big hit. Neatly side-stepping the musician's union ban that afflicted her former label, Holiday soon became a priority at Decca, earning the right to top-quality material and lavish string sections for her sessions. She continued recording scattered sessions for Decca during the rest of the '40s, and recorded several of her best-loved songs including Bessie Smith's "'Tain't Nobody's Business If I Do," "Them There Eyes," and "Crazy He Calls Me."

Though her artistry was at its peak, Billie Holiday's emotional life began a turbulent period during the mid-'40s. Already heavily into alcohol and marijuana, she began smoking opium early in the decade with her first husband, Johnnie Monroe. The marriage didn't last, but hot on its heels came a second marriage to trumpeter Joe Guy and a move to heroin. Despite her triumphant concert at New York's Town Hall and a small film role — as a maid (!) — with Louis Armstrong in 1947's New Orleans, she lost a good deal of money running her own orchestra with Joe Guy. Her mother's death soon after affected her deeply, and in 1947 she was arrested for possession of heroin and sentenced to eight months in prison.

Unfortunately, Holiday's troubles only continued after her release. The drug charge made it impossible for her to get a cabaret card, so nightclub performances were out of the question. Plagued by various celebrity hawks from all portions of the underworld (jazz, drugs, song publishing, etc.), she soldiered on for Decca until 1950. Two years later, she began recording for jazz entrepreneur Norman Granz, owner of the excellent labels Clef, Norgran, and by 1956, Verve. The recordings returned her to the small-group intimacy of her Columbia work, and reunited her with Ben Webster as well as other top-flight musicians such as Oscar Peterson, Harry "Sweets" Edison, and Charlie Shavers. Though the ravages of a hard life were beginning to take their toll on her voice, many of Holiday's mid-'50s recordings are just as intense and beautiful as her classic work.

During 1954, Holiday toured Europe to great acclaim, and her 1956 autobiography brought her even more fame (or notoriety). She made her last great appearance in 1957, on the CBS television special The Sound of Jazz with Webster, Lester Young, and Coleman Hawkins providing a close backing. One year later, the Lady in Satin LP clothed her naked, increasingly hoarse voice with the overwrought strings of Ray Ellis. During her final year, she made two more appearances in Europe before collapsing in May 1959 of heart and liver disease. Still procuring heroin while on her death bed, Holiday was arrested for possession in her private room and died on July 17, her system completely unable to fight both withdrawal and heart disease at the same time. Her cult of influence spread quickly after her death and gave her more fame than she'd enjoyed in life. The 1972 biopic Lady Sings the Blues featured Diana Ross struggling to overcome the conflicting myths of Holiday's life, but the film also illuminated her tragic life and introduced many future fans. By the digital age, virtually all of Holiday's recorded material had been reissued: by Columbia (nine volumes of The Quintessential Billie Holiday), Decca (The Complete Decca Recordings), and Verve (The Complete Billie Holiday on Verve 1945-1959).

Billie Holiday　比莉·荷莉戴 / Eleanora Fagan

艺人介绍

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Billie Holiday 比莉·荷莉戴 / Eleanora Fagan

艺人介绍

热门评论

最新简评（共496条）

Billie Holiday　比莉·荷莉戴 / Eleanora Fagan