Saturday, April 21, 2012: Billie Holiday - You Don't Know What Love Is

1958. Lady In Satin is released. Billie Holiday would be dead by July the following year.

When I was growing up, I somehow associated Jazz with Easy Listening.

Lady In Satin is Hard Listening. Billie Holiday, in more ways than any other musical artist, showed me what it was to bear your soul in your art. What it was to leave nothing behind, to put it all up there.

What it was to rend the heavens with your work and have the angels listen in.

Music never gets more real than Billie Holiday.

About this week - I didn't get to Stan Getz, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins, Oscar Peterson, Dave Brubeck, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bix Beiderbecke, Bill Evans, Ornette Coleman, John McLaughlin or Diana Krall.

But, if I can share Billie Holiday with someone, one person, who's never heard that voice before

then it's all worth it. Then this would be a success.