Billie holiday

Monday

Alexander Larman

The late Quincy Jones, a man of many talents

The death of Quincy Jones, at the considerable age of ninety-one, represents not just the passing of a great American musical icon, but the departure of a truly remarkable man from the stage. The winner of an astounding twenty-eight Grammy awards, he excelled in so many different areas of music — from record production and film soundtrack composition to big band jazz and multi-instrumental playing — that it would not have been particularly surprising to discover that he had written operas or symphonies on his days off.

quincy jones

Sunday

Alison Kerr

A look into Billie Holiday’s final year

If ever a singer were difficult to pin down, it was Billie Holiday (1915-59), whose harrowing life story was first told in an unreliable memoir published just three years before her death. With Lady Sings the Blues, the jazz legend known for her emotional honesty not only allowed herself to be misrepresented (after all, she wasn’t even a blues singer), but actively participated in fabricating the fake stories which proliferated through the book. Some of these — such as a misstatement of her place of birth — are still repeated to this day. Two decades after the publication of Lady Sings the Blues a steady stream of more accurate biographies began to appear.

Holiday