Download or read book Three Transnational Jazz Singers Josephine Baker Billie Holiday Ella Fitzgerald written by Aaron E. Lefkovitz and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Billie Holiday written by Bud Kliment and published by Holloway House Publishing. This book was released on 1990 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of one of the most widely admired jazz singers of all time.
Download or read book Billie Holiday written by Rebecca Carey Rohan and published by Cavendish Square Publishing, LLC. This book was released on 2016-07-15 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Billie Holiday is one of the most beloved American musicians to this day, and a prominent artist of the Harlem Renaissance. Learn about the challenges she faced and the fame she gained as a result of her unique sound.
Download or read book Billie Holiday written by John Szwed and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-03-31 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: • 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 talent When 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.
Download or read book Ella Fitzgerald written by Stuart Nicholson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-22 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stuart Nicholson's biography of Ella Fitzgerald is considered a classic in jazz literature. Drawing on original documents, interviews, and new information, Nicholson draws a complete picture of Fitzgerald's professional and personal life. Fitzgerald rose from being a pop singer with chart-novelty hits in the late '30s to become a bandleader and then one of the greatest interpreters of American popular song. Along with Billie Holiday, she virtually defined the female voice in jazz, and countless others followed in her wake and acknowledged her enormous influence. Also includes two 8-page inserts.
Download or read book Lady Day written by Robert O'Meally and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2000-09-07 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Billie Holiday deserves a biography in which her musicianship isn't overshadowed by the tragic events of her life. O'Meally has written that book," says Entertainment Weekly about this absorbing and authoritative account of the greatest jazz singer in history. O'Meally emphasizes Holiday's artistry and training rather than her personal miseries, and he uses voluminous archival material to correct common myths about Holiday. Chronicling her rigorous musical apprenticeship in Baltimore, her reception in New York by Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington, and her work with various musicians, particularly Lester Young, Lady Day is an impassioned testament to Holiday's genius that confirms her place in American jazz.
Download or read book The Billie Holiday Companion written by Leslie Gourse and published by Schirmer Trade Books. This book was released on 1997 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most troubling, and troubled, artists in the history of jazz, Billie Holiday remains an enigma despite numerous attempts to eulogize, analyze, and criticize her life and career. This new addition to Schirmer's Companion Series provides an objective assessment of "Lady Day's" life, talent, and of her place among the legends of jazz.
Download or read book Josephine Baker Billie Holiday Ella Fitzgerald s Transnational Power Compromises 1906 1996 written by Aaron E. Lefkovitz and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Josephine Baker, Billie Holiday, and Ella Fitzgerald's transnational power compromises reveal the ongoing dilemma of a female performer of color's compromised racial, gender, and colonial power. To respond to this dilemma, Baker, Holiday, and Fitzgerald address a female performer of color's power compromises, or give and take, back and forth struggles for control. Baker, Holiday, and Fitzgerald's compromised power and power compromises connect to additional female performers of color, whose Hollywood films, international exchanges, and popular music provided opportunities for greater self-determination while exploiting the exoticism of female performers of color's racial, gender, and colonial differences. Adding film and popular music to black transnational and global gender biographies, Josephine Baker, Billie Holiday, and Ella Fitzgerald link film and popular music to histories of the US and global color line, hetero-patriarchy, and US, French, and Orientalist colonialism. I ask, can Baker, Holiday, and Fitzgerald's power compromises enlarge ideas of power beyond an either/or binary of oppression versus defiance? How can Baker, Holiday, and Fitzgerald's power compromises contribute to an understanding of film and popular musical stereotypes' impact on a female performer of color's compromised power? In new research, I add primary sources describing Josephine Baker, Billie Holiday, and Ella Fitzgerald's power compromises with 20th century white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, and colonialism. This includes articles from the African-American press detailing Baker, Holiday, and Fitzgerald's rebel, transnational sojourns, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Manuscripts, Archives, Rare Books, Photographs, and Prints Divisions, Harvard University Houghton Library Josephine Baker Papers, Rutgers University Institute of Jazz Studies Press Collection, Ella Fitzgerald archives, housed in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and Library of Congress, NAACP lynching records as they pertain to "Strange Fruit," Billie Holiday's anti-racist anthem, and Josephine Baker and Martin Luther King, Jr. 's 1960s correspondence, housed in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change Archives. I also incorporate Baker, Holiday, and Fitzgerald's film, television, and popular musical stereotypes, photographs, Art Deco lithographs, and novels, plays, poetry, and contemporary tributes evoking each performer. My Introduction centers Baker, Holiday, and Fitzgerald's compromised power and power compromises in a broader context of ways female performers of color have lost and gained power and compare and contrast my dissertation with previous literature centering each performer. Chapter One presents Baker, Holiday, and Fitzgerald's foundational, biographical outline. It follows Baker, Holiday, and Fitzgerald from their poor and abusive childhoods to international fame, placing their performative histories in broader white supremacist, hetero-patriarchal, and US, French, and Orientalist colonial contexts. My next three chapters detail Baker, Holiday, and Fitzgerald's racial, hetero-patriarchal, and US, French, and Orientalist colonial power compromises, with a particular focus on their cinematic and popular musical stereotypes. Chapter Two emphasizes Josephine Baker's French colonial chanson (French song) "Si J'́etais Blanche," or "If I Were White" and her relationships to Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, and contemporary female performers of color Beyonc©♭ and Janet Jackson. This chapter examines Billie Holiday's links to the Motown record label, 1970s Blaxploitation films, and film stereotypes of female performers of color before and after her, seen in her films Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life (1935), New Orleans (1947), and Lady Sings the Blues (1972). It also centers the racial power Holiday gained by singing the anti-racist "Strange Fruit" in Jim Crow America and 1950s Europe. Chapter Two concludes with a discussion of the racial, Southern, and Chicago politics of Ella Fitzgerald's 1956 Louis Armstrong duet "Stars Fell on Alabama" and her performance in her final film, Let No Man Write My Epitaph (1960). Chapter Three focuses on Baker, Holiday, and Fitzgerald's compromises with 20th century hetero-patriarchy in the film and music industries and broader US and international cultures. It highlights HBO's The Josephine Baker Story (1991) and this docudrama's perpetuation of Baker's film stereotypes and comparisons and contrasts between Billie Holiday's power compromises with mid-20th century hetero-patriarchy and those of Nina Simone, blues and jazz women, 1960s girl groups, and female rappers. Chapter Three concludes with a discussion of the shifting yet constant gender roles Ella Fitzgerald performs in her films Pete Kelly's Blues (1955), St. Louis Blues (1958), and Let No Man Write My Epitaph (1960) and the male gazes she negotiates in these films from leading men Jack Webb, of Dragnet fame, and Nat "King" Cole. Chapter Four illuminates Baker, Holiday, and Fitzgerald's US, French, and Orientalist colonial power compromises, beginning with Baker's French colonial films Siren of the Tropics (1927), Zou Zou (1934), and Princess Tam-Tam (1935) and chansons "J'ai Deux Amours," or "I Have Two Loves," "Ma Petite Tonkinoise," "Haiti," "Sous le Ciel d'Afrique," or "Under the African Sky," and "Aux Iles Hawaii." This chapter places Baker in a legacy of caricatures of Hawaii as a tropical paradise and cinematic and popular musical Orientalism, or ways of looking at North African, Middle Eastern, and South and East Asian cultures in stereotypical ways. Chapter Four chronicles Billie Holiday's 1950s rebel, European sojourns, when Holiday performed the anti-colonial "Strange Fruit," exposing white supremacy in the US while the State Department "Jazz Ambassadors" were dispatched to export "America's classical music" to non-aligned, Global South populations. This final chapter concludes with Ella Fitzgerald's participation in Native American cinematic stereotypical legacies in her film Ride 'Em Cowboy (1942) and her exportation of jazz to Japan, continuing that nation's century-long jazz interests. In Conclusion, I contend Baker, Holiday, and Fitzgerald assist in understanding ways white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, and colonialism changed throughout the 20th century, film and popular music's relationships to these oppressions, and how white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, and US, French, and Orientalist colonialism compromised each performer's power and roles they played in their power compromises.
Download or read book Billie Holiday written by John White and published by Spellmount, Limited Publishers. This book was released on 1987 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Billie Holiday written by Magdalena Alagna and published by Rosen Central. This book was released on 2003 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the life and career of one of the greatest jazz singers of the twentieth century, Billie Holiday.
Download or read book Ella Fitzgerald written by Grace Hansen and published by Abdo Kids Jumbo. This book was released on 2015-12-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cover -- Copyright -- Table of Contents -- Birth & Early Life -- The Apollo -- Fame! -- Death & Legacy -- Timeline -- Glossary -- Index -- Abdo Kids Code
Download or read book Becoming Ella Fitzgerald The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song written by Judith Tick and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2023-12-05 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An NPR 2023 "Books We Love" Pick • A Kirkus Best Nonfiction Book of 2023 A landmark biography that reclaims Ella Fitzgerald as a major American artist and modernist innovator. Ella Fitzgerald (1917–1996) possessed one of the twentieth century’s most astonishing voices. In this first major biography since Fitzgerald’s death, historian Judith Tick offers a sublime portrait of this ambitious risk-taker whose exceptional musical spontaneity made her a transformational artist. Becoming Ella Fitzgerald clears up long-enduring mysteries. Archival research and in-depth family interviews shed new light on the singer’s difficult childhood in Yonkers, New York, the tragic death of her mother, and the year she spent in a girls’ reformatory school—where she sang in its renowned choir and dreamed of being a dancer. Rarely seen profiles from the Black press offer precious glimpses of Fitzgerald’s tense experiences of racial discrimination and her struggles with constricting models of Black and white femininity at midcentury. Tick’s compelling narrative depicts Fitzgerald’s complicated career in fresh and original detail, upending the traditional view that segregates vocal jazz from the genre’s mainstream. As she navigated the shifting tides between jazz and pop, she used her originality to pioneer modernist vocal jazz. Interpreting long-lost setlists, reviews from both white and Black newspapers, and newly released footage and recordings, the book explores how Ella’s transcendence as an improvisor produced onstage performances every bit as significant as her historic recorded oeuvre. From the singer’s first performance at the Apollo Theatre’s famous “Amateur Night” to the Savoy Ballroom, where Fitzgerald broke through with Chick Webb’s big band in the 1930s, Tick evokes the jazz world in riveting detail. She describes how Ella helped shape the bebop movement in the 1940s, as she joined Dizzy Gillespie and her then-husband, Ray Brown, in the world-touring Jazz at the Philharmonic, one of the first moments of high-culture acceptance for the disreputable art form. Breaking ground as a female bandleader, Fitzgerald refuted expectations of musical Blackness, deftly balancing artistic ambition and market expectations. Her legendary exploration of the Great American Songbook in the 1950s fused a Black vocal aesthetic and jazz improvisation to revolutionize the popular repertoire. This hybridity often confounded critics, yet throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Ella reached audiences around the world, electrifying concert halls, and sold millions of records. A masterful biography, Becoming Ella Fitzgerald describes a powerful woman who set a standard for American excellence nearly unmatched in the twentieth century.
Download or read book Billie Holiday written by Stuart Nicholson and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[A sensitive, perceptive biography. . . [Nicholson successfully portrays both the genius and the tragedy of the legendary Lady Day." -- Publishers Weekly
Download or read book Lady Day written by Robert G. O'Meally and published by Arcade Pub. This book was released on 1991 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of the "First Lady" of modern jazz, based on newly released archival information, stresses her contributions to jazz singing instead of dwelling on her personal difficulties
Download or read book Billie Holiday written by Bud Kliment and published by Turtleback. This book was released on 1990-12 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NULL
Download or read book Ella Fitzgerald written by Stuart Nicholson and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Billie s Blues written by John Chilton and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 1989-08-22 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anyone who has ever heard a Billie Holiday record knows the sound of her voice—sad, sexy, always relaxed but securely aware of the beat. Conveying a poignancy that cut to the heart of a song, she redeemed even trivial material with her impeccable sense of dramatic phrasing and time. The well-known tale of her lifelong battle with drugs has obscured the artistry that has made her one of the most revered singers of the twentieth century. Everyone from Frank Sinatra (who in the 1950s called her ”unquestionably the most important influence on American popular singing in the last twenty years”) to Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan has recognized the singularity of her interpretations. The racism that Billie found at every turn, whether in Artie Shaw's band or in the heart of the south, immortalized in the chilling song ”Strange Fruit,” cannot be overlooked in her biography. Jazz historian John Chilton has told the story of her short, tragic, influential career with restraint, correcting many of the more sensational tales she wrote about herself in Lady Sings the Blues. Buck Clayton, who knew Billie in the Basie band during the nineteen-thirties, has written a warm and personal foreword to this fascinating biography of a great American artist.
