Billie Holiday

Billie Holiday's newly released album, "Billie Holiday Essentials: The Greatest Songs of the Jazz Diva," is a comprehensive collection celebrating the iconic singer's most beloved tracks. This compilation features some of her most significant works, showcasing her unique voice and emotive delivery that have left a lasting impact on jazz and blues music.

Billie Holiday, born as Elionora Harris and originally named Eleanora Fagan, (* April 7, 1915 in Philadelphia; † July 17, 1959 in New York City) is one of the most important American jazz singers with Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan.

Celle qui naquit le 7 avril 1915 fut un cri avant tout… Même dans ses instants les plus doux. Billie Holiday est un genre à elle seule de l’histoire du jazz. Certes chanteuse elle fut, mais de ce chant qu’on capte dans les effluves d’un solo de saxophone. Comme un torrent qui n’a finalement que peu à voir avec… le chant ? Cette voix si atypique dérangeait. Dérange encore d’ailleurs. Éraillée ? Distordue ? Décalée ? Délavée ? Une voix comme la mise en son d’une existence qui ne fut qu’une longue souffrance qu’elle coucha sur le papier en 1956, trois ans avant sa mort, dans son autobiographie Lady Sings The Blues.

Don't Explain is a timeless collection of works by the legendary Billie Holiday, originally released in 1982 by Audio Fidelity.

Written with Arthur Herzog Jr. it is said that Billie’s lyric was inspired on real-life heartache, when her husband, Jimmy Monroe, came home one night with lipstick traces on his collar. Released in 1945, it would become one of her best known tunes.

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. More than a half-century 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.

Billie Holiday (born Eleanora Fagan; April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959) was an American jazz and swing music singer. Nicknamed "Lady Day" by her friend and music partner, Lester Young, Holiday made a significant contribution to jazz music and pop singing. Her vocal style, strongly influenced by jazz instrumentalists, inspired a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo. She was known for her vocal delivery and improvisational skills.

"Throughout the night, Billie was in superior form to what had sometimes been the case in the last years of her life … there was an outgoing warmth, a palpable eagerness to reach and touch the audience.

Eleanora Fagan (April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959), known professionally as Billie Holiday, was an American jazz and swing music singer.

Billie Holiday (born Eleanora Fagan; April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959) was an American jazz and swing music singer.