METTA SINGS BILLIE HOLLIDAY

Duration: 1 hour

It's always great to sing Billie Holiday's songs. ❤ 

She is one of the singers who has settled the deepest in my heart. The unpolished pain, deep love and devotion into both music and life. A hard life in the fight against the racism that marked the United States and in the fight to, as an African-American singer, maintain dignity and justice in a male-dominated music industry. Billie's personal struggle with the abuse and love that ended her life far too soon and features in many of her latest audio clips, turns into the deep real emotions we love her for

"I Can't Give You anything but Love" "Body and Soul" "God Bless the Child" "Strange Fruit" and many others of the beloved and legendary songs passed through marrow and bones, and have impressed us all in our feelings of the authentic voice and mood from American jazz.

I hope to honor all the beautiful powerful songs this evening where I have also chosen to sing some of the songs in my own versions with influences from both hip hop and R'n'B.

From the bottom of my heart thank you Billie Holiday 

ABOUT LADY DAY

Billie Holiday (born Eleanora Fagan) (April 7, 1915 in Baltimore, USA – July 17, 1959 in New York) was an American jazz singer. "Her great strength was her unique ability to enter popular music's best melodies for decades and recite the lyrics in such a heart-rending way that the often banal words came to appear as luminous poetry. The original girlish sweetness in her singing was gradually replaced by a hoarse fragility in her voice, but she retained to the end the ability to carry the lyrics' often bittersweet knowledge of love directly to the listeners' own experience".

"All I dream of is a man, a little house, with kids in it, that's all I ever dream of" -Ladyday.