Book Excerpt: The final years of Billie Holiday wbgo.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from wbgo.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Debut and
Post, the coming-of-age albums of the now 55-year-old Icelandic musician Björk, are a great showcase of the kind of mark she is leaving, with each song, on the world of music.
When her punk-rock band, the Sugarcubes, dismantled in late December 1992, Björk took her talents to London and embarked on a solo career where she immersed herself in the culture of the place and took inspiration from the city’s underground club scene.
Debut and Post were most certainly a move away from the alternative rock sounds of the Sugarcubes.
Her move to the UK was a creative decision and a step she felt needed to be taken to progress her sound. “I just had to follow my heart, and my heart was those beats that were happening in England. And maybe what I’m understanding more and more as I get older, is that music like Kate Bush has really influenced me. Brian Eno. Acid. Electronic beats. Labels like Warp. And if there’s such a thing in pop music as a Music Tree, I see myse
Dec 16, 2020 10:48 PM EDT
In the opening performance of a new documentary, Billie Holiday is mesmerizing in full color. The original, decades-old footage has been colorized for emphasis, like the way her eyebrow arches to punctuate a lyric as she sings.
The scene is also a mission statement of sorts: The film, “Billie,” wants to go beyond the black-and-white and incomplete narrative of self-destructive jazz artists.
Shortly after that opening scene, Sylvia Syms, herself an admired jazz singer and friend of Holiday’s, is heard on tape saying that she “saw the whole world in that face. All of the beauty and all of the misery.”