Tag: Billie Holiday

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After a fulsome embrace of jazz and roots music on her Blue Note debut The Omnichord Real Book - where she laid down her spear and traded sweet grooves with the likes of Joel Ross, Jeff Parker, Ambrose Akinmusire and Brandee Younger while the distinctive chimes of her harp-like instrument also stretched in the direction of seventies go-go and strung-out...

Around the age of fourteen or fifteen when I began to spend every other high school lunch break on a discursion around town, scouring Borders and a plethora of secondhand record stores for CDs and other cultural bric-à-brac, my first introduction to the music of Billie Holiday came by way of Proper Records and their four-disc box sets. Whatever...

Charles Mingus wrote 'Goodbye Pork Pie Hat' as an elegy for the pioneering jazz saxophonist Lester Young, who died in March 1959, two months prior to the recording sessions for what would become Mingus Ah Um. A darkly elegant ballad with a lone dissonant note full of pathos...