7/6/2023 0 Comments John szwed billie holidaySzwed goes on to quote the composer and jazz historian Gunther Schuller: “We can, of course, describe and analyze the surface mechanics of her art: her style, her technique, her personal vocal attributes, and I suppose a poet could express the essence of her art or at least give us, by poetic analogy, his particular insight into it. In her early years, some called it sad, olive-toned, whisky-hued, lazy, feline, smoky, unsentimental, weird.” In Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth, a book that is less standard biography and more an extended commentary on Holiday’s art, the shrewd and generous author John Szwed writes, “Billie Holiday’s voice is odd, indelibly odd, and so easy to recognize, but so difficult to describe. The idea here is to come up with someone you have heard as a means of introducing you to someone you’re unfamiliar with.Īnd then there’s Billie Holiday, who sounds like no one else. Most commonly even the best writers fall back on analogies. Words become pitiful tools when we use them to describe music.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |