A new Billie Holiday documentary prompts a look at the films that best capture the spirit of the jazz greats
The first thing anyone ever heard in the movies was jazz – in cinema’s first sound film, The Jazz
Singer, of course, a creaky 1927 backstage drama that now only really has historical-milestone status to recommend it. (It’s on
Amazon if you’re curious.) By now, happily, the cinema of jazz is a sophisticated, richly stocked subgenre, with
British director James Erskine’s Billie (Barbican Cinema on demand) the latest addition.
The tumultuous life and death of Billie Holiday has long demanded a major documentary study, and Erskine’s film digs in with the advantage of a vast, hitherto unheard interview archive: candid testimonies from
Friends and associates such as Count Basie and Tony Bennett, recorded in the 1970s by the late journalist Linda Lipnack Kuehl, for a planned biography that never came to pass. They lend credible immediacy to a doc that otherwise takes a familiar approach to a tragic-fallen-star narrative, and works as a Holiday primer for uninformed viewers. The performance footage, unsurprisingly, is a joy – notwithstanding the questionable artistic decision to colourise a significant portion of it. Doesn’t that voice have enough shades of its own?