Lady Day, Fine and Mellow

I have already brought up the comforting and empathetic quality of Billie Holiday’s voice in an earlier post on gestures. This video is from the December 8, 1957, CBS television special, “The Sound of Jazz.” In this performance alongside some of the best Jazz musicians of her time, Lady Day (in her early 40s) is reunited with Lester Young with whom a riff had separated them for some time. In less than two years, Lester Young was to die, and then Billlie four months later. “Love is like a faucet, it turns off and on,” Billie sings here in “Fine and Mellow” which can be described as exactly that: fine and mellow.