Billie & Me

Terri Lyne Carrington, Director, Drum
Rita Coolidge/Niki Haris/Joan Osbourne/Dianne Reeves/Rotia Traoré, Vocals

It is a spectacular show which celebrates Billie Holiday's spirit and her music. The story follows Holiday's passion about her music and her struggle to go through amid white male dominant music industry. Another time, I wish to take a close look into the lyrics of her music.

Osbourne has a pristine vocal style in comparison with Coolidge and Haris and "I'm a fool to want you" she presented still hangs around my ears. Reeves has a charisma and responds to her expected fame. Her duet song--I think it is "Endangered species", or it doesn't matter anyway--with Traoré is the zenith tonight. Traoré has a very unusual style in that her voice sounds fragile but not vulnerable, rather even spiritual. Her voice seems to come from a temple in a deep mountain. Metal instruments don't go well with her voice and only a few percussions and a bass might be the best match for her. I wish to see Reeves and Traoré together another time.

I cannot help thinking of the show that I saw last summer in Paris, which was about Edite Piaf. Several musicians (or performers) sang Piaf's songs on a small stage with some dance. What makes me feel more sympathy toward Holiday is the hardship she went through and a role model she left to others--at least as far as I can tell after seeing the two shows. Bitterness in life gives one a unique opportunity to mature. But how can one turn the bitterness into the ripe?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bassist Stanley Clarke

Trio! Stanley Clarke, Bass Béla Fleck, Banjo Jean-Luc Ponty, Violin ...at Chicago Symphony Center A week ago, I told my friend that it was not easy for me to appreciate the bass itself because the tone tends to be very low and never predominant. But today, I need to change what I said. Most of all I haven't seen a more wonderful picture of a man with a bass than tonight. The big instrument always seemed to suspend the player in an awkward position. But Mr. Clarke dominates the instrument and plays with it. The gigantic instrument sometimes becomes a drum with trembling strings or sometimes becomes a guitar which seems to be passed onto a Spanish flamenco music player. All the time he looks much more passionate than any flamenco dancer. I am deeply impressed that one can explode such dynamic sound and rhythm from the bass. Mr. Ponty also presents violin sound which I never heard before. It seems that he doesn't care making beatiful melody and he likes to go beyond the tone withi
Read more

The Sociology of Education in Canada

Wotherspoon, Terry. (2004). 2nd Ed. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press. Sociology, which was first used by the French writer Compte in the nineteenth century to read the rapidly changing society after the Industrial revolution, is foremost a study of society and is divided into diverse fields which are determined by the perspective each study takes. Three major perspectives are structural functionalism--focusing on the orderly social structure, like a living organism, thus fundamentally aiming to stablize the structure by identifying and removing harmful elements in the social structure--interpretative analysis--emphasizing a micro level human interactions and social symbols on the basis that the world is socially constructed and the reality exists only through the member's relationship with other members, language, knowledge, etc--and critical sociology--as seen in Marxism and feminism, analyzes fundamental structural inequality of the society and aims to subvert the underlyin
Read more

A History of Violence

Directed by David Cronenberg (2005) Cronenberg had left me a sensation of nauseating horror from "Videodrome" and "Crash". (I am just amazed that he also directed "M. Butterfly", which is quite different from his other works.) Just out of curiosity about how he described violence, I went to a theatre on a rainly Saturday afternoon. The film begins with such a weary dialog between two murderers. The car slowly moves and so does the camera, then it reveals three murdered bodies uniquely. First is from the murderer's eyes when he entered the room, second is after his pushing an object in front of the camera, then the third is by taking a shot of a gun. This prelude, which could be an independent short movie, sets fire on this film. Tom Stall(by Viggo Mortensen), who is a business owner of a small restaurant in a small town, has those two murderes in his restaurant and comes to kill them to protect others. This somewhat secretly reserved guy becomes a nati
Read more