Lady Day: The Many Faces Of Billie Holiday

Legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday is the subject of this excellent documentary which features rare clips of Holiday performing on television as well as interviews with contemporaries Carmen McRae, Buck Clayton, Milt Gabler, Annie Ross, Albert Murray, and others. Written by Robert O'Meally, and based on his book of the same name, the program uses Holiday's autobiography Lady Sings the Blues (read by actress Ruby Dee) as its departure point. Though true in spirit, the program reveals that Holiday exaggerated many of the incidents in the book. Running throughout the commentaries of the interviewees is an unmistakable love and deep respect for the tremendous musical talents of Holiday. And audiences receive a generous helping of those talents in performances of such Holiday classics as "What a Little Moonlight Can Do," "God Bless the Child," "My Man," and the powerfully unsettling anti-lynching song "Strange Fruit." Unfortunately, some of the television clips are wavy and carry less than perfect soundtracks, but this is a fault of the technology of the time, not the video. An excellent documentary. Sure to be popular. Highly recommended. (Available from most distributors.)