Madison, WI
USA
This is not your grandma’s Billie Holiday documentary. This is not Ken Burns’s Jazz. This is not the usual erudite, know-it-all talking heads pontificating endlessly and airlessly about some past master. This is not the latest Verve re-release.
Linda Lipnack Kuehl was a journalist and Billie Holiday obsessive. She spent most of the 1970s tracking down and interviewing a stunning cavalcade of Billie’s contemporaries, including her bandmates, her lovers, and her childhood friends. We’re talking Count Basie, we’re talking Sylvia Sims, we’re talking about the federal drug enforcement agents tasked
with tracking her every move. Kuehl recorded all of these people and wound up with hundreds of hours of tapes. Then, in 1979, she died. She never finished the book she was working on. No one ever heard these tapes…until now.
Four decades later, director James Erskine has come along to pick up the pieces, to finish the work Kuehl started, evocatively weaving Kuehl’s recordings with archival interviews and poignant performance footage into a powerful cinematic portrait. It’s an unvarnished portrait—we’re talking industrial strength paint remover, walls stripped down to the original wood planks—revealing the artist behind the art with no artifice.
It’s a vision of Lady Day like none we’ve seen or heard before. Billie presents a raw but nuanced Holiday, whose devastating abilities were shaped, colored, and damaged by the complex, and often harrowing life she led, including sex trafficking, rampant drug use, exploitative managers, abusive partners, and heartbreaking struggles against racism and discrimination. But as Kuehl believed, and Erskine sets about proving, Holiday was no victim. She was a groundbreaking pioneer, a singular talent, and as this stunning new doc makes clear, a once-in-a-generation force of nature.
