Probably no voice in the history of jazz exerts a deeper fascination than the vulnerable, intimate slur of Billie Holiday, who died in 1959 at the age of 44. With a vocal range of barely an octave and the timbre of a muted horn, Miss Holiday's singing was far from athletic, but it spanned the emotional range of the universe, communicating joy and pain with an immediacy that seemed at once artless and profoundly sophisticated.
Remembering Billie Holiday in her novel ''Sleepless Nights,'' Elizabeth Hardwick came as close as anyone to capturing the essence of a performer who, after all that has been written about her, remains a profound enigma. ''The heart always drew back from the power of her will and its engagement with disaster,'' Ms. Hardwick wrote. ''Stately, sinister and determined, somehow she had retrieved from darkness the miracle of pure style.'' — Stephen Holden
Funmi Tofowomo
--The art of living and impermanence.
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