![\"Billie](\"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Billie-listening-laughing.jpg\")
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Each of us who loves Billie Holiday in all her mercurial variations favors the one we saw first. For me, it was a clip from the TV recital she gave in 1957 for the nonpareil CBS special, \u201cThe Sound of Jazz.\u201d It was the kind of show my parents would have watched attentively with their friends in our living room if only because there were so few TV shows of any kind in those primordial days that featured so many black people in one place playing music. And I was the kind of five-year-old who\u2019d have stopped and stared at it while all the grownups alternately chattered and listened. But I don\u2019t remember much about the show\u2019s first telecast and didn\u2019t see Holiday\u2019s performance until ten years later when her segment was excerpted on some black history special on the same network. And what I saw, however fleeting, haunted me forever.<\/p>\n
For starters, I never\u00a0heard a voice like hers before \u2013 and this was about the time that, according to conventional wisdom, that voice was less powerful, less robust and more frayed than it had been in its earlier bloom. It still sounded special to me; so much so, that I couldn\u2019t find the words to characterize it. Even now, I feel myself groping for adjectives like \u201csultry,\u201d \u201cpliant,\u201d or even \u201cdelicately spiced.\u201d (Wince.) With any force of nature, to describe is to diminish its power.<\/p>\n
Yet the voice was for me the least of it at that moment. What hit me in a deeper place was what my older, wiser self would now call her sang-froid. The composure, regal and raw, was a compound I\u2019d seen before in dozens of singers, black and white, old and young, male and female. But never before had I been aware that such commanding presence could be as inscrutable as the main character in a mystery story; a master thief, say, blithely slipping into a dark alley concealing gilded swag, or a cynical detective who\u2019d stumbled onto a solution she wished she hadn\u2019t, but wasn\u2019t going to let its horror trip her up — or keep rough justice at bay. She was fire and ice, calibrated with a perfection that I\u2019d dimly suspected was harder to achieve than it looked.<\/p>\n
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