In Memory: Lady Day
Today is Tuesday, 17 July 2007.
There should have been a column yesterday on the first atomic bomb detonation, but I've had a bad arthritis episode, and couldn't really type with one finger, as I'm doing now. Hopefully, tomorrow.
Must mention: Billy Holiday died on this date in 1959.
There should have been a column yesterday on the first atomic bomb detonation, but I've had a bad arthritis episode, and couldn't really type with one finger, as I'm doing now. Hopefully, tomorrow.
Must mention: Billy Holiday died on this date in 1959.
posted by HH at 12:02 PM
4 Comments:
I wonder about the date of this performance?
Strange Fruit reference
I'm not enough of a jazz musicologist to know. However, sadly, given the nature of Lady Day's various addictions, and the tragically bloated look (she was only 44 when she died), I think it must be fairly late. Given the tradgedies of her life, it has to be one of the great musical historical "what ifs?: the arc of her career if she had died peacefully in her sleep at 84?
Sidebar: while she lay dying, NYC police callously served an arrest warrant on her, because, after all, in the USA/USE, narcotics addiction isn't a medical condition, it's a crime.
Someone with more composing talent than HH should write the song: "It's Still a Neo-Puritan, Religious-Sociopathic Nation". I bet one could march to it.
A plot line explored by SF playwrights, novelists and short story writers.
We are occasionally given an undeserved boon that may spring largely from risk-taking behavior that involves conscious, or unconsious disregard of consequences.
Let us celebrate the life and artistry in total, of Lady Day and once again pause to reflect on the long-standing philosophical question of whether our species knowledge of our own death should be celebrated as the stimulus that sharpens our purpose.
I'm thinking that your theme would work so much better as a waltz (or better yet, as a polka, especially seeing as how Ravel already been there done that).
The date of this performance is February 1959, filmed at Chelsea Studios in London for Granada TV.
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