Billie Holiday
vocals
Singer; Barry remembers her playing a Detroit club he calls the Flame Bar, and once wrote string arrangements in a hurry for a programme of her songs.
- mentions
- 5
- recordings
- 5
- Barry speaking
- 2
What Barry says
Listing the great places in Detroit when he was starting out, Barry tells Marian McPartland that Billie Holiday played at a club he calls the Flame Bar.
Piano Jazz with Marian McPartland7:16
Barry and Charles McPherson were booked to play McPherson’s Billie Holiday album in Detroit with ten Detroit Symphony players. The arranger, Ernie Wilkins, was in Europe with the music, so Barry wrote ten string arrangements himself, finishing on the plane.
Jazz theory, part 4: borrowing diminished notes2:48Barry Harris, Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program ¶313
A woman in the orchestra told Barry it was some of the most beautiful music she had ever played; the success led on to his own concerts with strings and singers.
Jazz theory, part 4: borrowing diminished notes2:483:20Barry Harris, Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program ¶314
In his own words
There was all those great places. And Billie played at a place, Billie Holiday played at a place called the Flame Bar.
Charles McPherson had done this Billie Holliday album, and we were supposed to do that Billie Holliday album, and Ernie Wilkins had written all the music.
Every mention
5 moments in the recordings, 2 of them Barry speaking. Each says who is talking.
Piano Jazz with Marian McPartland
- 7:16
Among Detroit’s great venues: Billie Holiday played a place called the Flame Bar.
Jazz theory, part 4: borrowing diminished notes
- 2:48
With ten Detroit Symphony players, McPherson was to play Holiday tunes; the music was missing, so Barry wrote it.
Barry Harris, Red Rodney, Charles McPherson, Ray Drummond, Ben Riley - 1992-08-29, Riverside Park
- 34:13
Someone else
Radio announcer: at the bowling-alley bar whose jukebox Barry stocked, the bouncer goes around singing Billie Holiday.
Detroit Jazz: Ancient to the Future
- 2:46
Someone else
A poet’s roll call of jazz singers names Lady Day, Billie Holiday, beside Dinah Washington and Ella Fitzgerald.
My Chat With Chris Parks From Things I Learned From Barry Harris
- 12:30
A student
Chris Parks learned the tunes Barry taught from straight singers like Sinatra, not from Holiday’s versions.
In the interviews and notes
Barry recalls a Detroit concert built on Charles McPherson’s Billie Holiday album, with ten Detroit Symphony players waiting. Ernie Wilkins had written the music but was in Europe with it, so Barry wrote string arrangements for the first time, finishing on the plane.
In an interview quoted by de Lima, Ethan Iverson mentions Barry’s view that Charlie Parker played in 4 and 6 at once; Wynton Marsalis replies that this is in everyone’s music and clearest in Billie Holiday: tap quarter-note triplets to her records and much of her phrasing falls on them.
Brian Jude de Lima, Reanimating Dissonance: Cultivating the Antecedents of Barry Harris’ Concept of Movement as a Multidimensional Pedagogical Tool for Ontario Post-Secondary Jazz Curricula ¶1534Brian Jude de Lima, Reanimating Dissonance: Cultivating the Antecedents of Barry Harris’ Concept of Movement as a Multidimensional Pedagogical Tool for Ontario Post-Secondary Jazz Curricula ¶1535Brian Jude de Lima, Reanimating Dissonance: Cultivating the Antecedents of Barry Harris’ Concept of Movement as a Multidimensional Pedagogical Tool for Ontario Post-Secondary Jazz Curricula ¶1537
De Lima offers Holiday’s 1939 recording of ‘Strange Fruit’, Abel Meeropol’s poem about lynching, as an example of synthesis in African American art: in his reading it joins beauty and torment, drawing on poetry and a photograph to make a new whole.
Brian Jude de Lima, Reanimating Dissonance: Cultivating the Antecedents of Barry Harris’ Concept of Movement as a Multidimensional Pedagogical Tool for Ontario Post-Secondary Jazz Curricula ¶396Brian Jude de Lima, Reanimating Dissonance: Cultivating the Antecedents of Barry Harris’ Concept of Movement as a Multidimensional Pedagogical Tool for Ontario Post-Secondary Jazz Curricula ¶397
Discussing how Barry might outline ‘All of Me’, a forum member notes that Billie Holiday’s version harmonises one passage as D minor, A7, D minor (transposed to C), which strengthens the feeling of a tonic minor on that ii chord.
Method ideas nearby
Ideas of the method taught in the classes where they come up, with how many mentions fall in each.