The Saddest Thing

This is the most upsetting thing I've seen in many a moon. It's super uncool that this video not only exist on YouTube, but that it's an over the top advertisement for a fast food chain that insists on opening in poor neighborhoods, while paying the employees that also live in the neighborhood a low wage. Watch and vomit.

Shame.

Lady Day's Blues

“I don’t think I sing the same way twice. … Anything I do sing is apart of my life” Billie Holiday

I’ve been thinking about the life of a singer once they’ve put their mark on a song. Once that music becomes apart of a record, a cd, a tape, an 8-track. What it does to us as listeners, as students of music, as admirers of their voices. What’s that noise, that timbre in their voice, or horn that transports us? What is it about the singers of the past that touches us today? Why can’t that sound be duplicated today, by the best voices of our generation? How does the human soul: its joy, heartache, torture and torment make its way up and out of a person so powerfully to the point where in 2011, a voice like Billie Holiday on a scratchy record can make you want to cry?

I guess the easiest answer is that there are no easy answers to any of those questions. I equate it with trying to understand why I can’t watch movies like Rosewood or see images of people I never knew, but knowing the simple reason of why they were killed swinging from a tree while others glance up gleefully, pointing, proud. That not more that 75 years ago the color I live with is the same of those that hung and burn on a tree in the South. The same color that was denied the education that so many of us enjoy today. The similar tone of many more that have been and are currently incarcerated because of a justice system that hates me and others of similar hue. It can’t be explained. I call it “soul wounds”. Wounds that have been passed down, without words; stories or otherwise, that are felt and connects Blacks as a people whether we like it or not.

All this to say, as I washed dishes today, Billie sung sweetly in my ear, letting me know that a love of hers is gone now, never to return. And I felt her, behind me. Neck twisted in emotion, finger raised as if to reach an elusive note. All right here in my kitchen on this quiet January night. Thank you Lady Day I love you too.

Listen - Billie Holiday "Solitude"

Listening to Ken Burns Jazz: Billie Holiday, Kind of Blue: Miles Davis.

Location: My kitchen