Billie Holiday Post Script 3: The Billie Holiday Project + The Rare Sides

Charles Wallace and I at Minton's, before the first set.

On Tuesday night at Minton's Harlem --  a sold out house! -- my quintet and I were joined by Charles Wallace to present Monkey Junk, a dramatic retelling of a newly discovered Zora Neale Hurston story from the 1930s, augmented by Billie Holiday's material from the same decade. We rounded out the evening with a set of Lady Day's rare sides -- songs that even her die-hard enthusiasts had never heard. 

Our last performance on April 28th in this month-long tribute to Lady Day will be a pastiche of each week's programming.  For more information and reservations, click here.

Billie Holiday Post Script 2: Carnegie Hall, 1956 -- The Refracted Set

On Tuesday night at Minton's Harlem, with a wonderfully enthusiastic audience (another full house!) and my coterie of musicians, I deconstructed Billie Holiday's last Carnegie Hall concert from November 10, 1956, which was created to promote her autobiography Lady Sings The Blues. Instead of reading from the book, I read from bits and pieces of ephemera I found at the New York Public Library.  It was a stellar night.

The next time you think of Billie Holiday as a victim and a heroin addict first instead of a genius musician, there are a few explosively noteworthy trainwrecks that you should reconsider, too. Frank Sinatra -- who openly admitted that everything he knew as a jazz vocalist he got from Lady Day -- was a violent alcoholic, addicted to painkillers and, some say, bipolar. Thelonious Monk drank, smoked pot and did drugs to excess. And yes, he had bipolar disorder.  Charlie Parker's propensity towards drug excess was legendary.  Miles Davis. Need I say more?

Nevermind infamous jazz musicians -- everybody knows about them. What about common drug usage?  During the Victorian era, laudanum -- a mix of 10% opium and 90% alcohol and flavored with cinnamon or saffran -- was especially popular.  And why not? It had been popular with the Greeks in antiquity. The Victorians used it to cure menstrual cramps, headaches, as a tranquilizer, even fed it to cranky babies. Everybody drank this stuff.  Keats. Shelley.  Dickens. Louis Carroll.  It was as common and as socially acceptable as scotch -- and much cheaper.  Not surprisingly, it was the beginning of the 20th century before they realized it was lethal.

And the rest? Chopin did opium drops on sugar cubes every day.  Leonard Bernstein was heavily addicted to alcohol, drugs and painkillers, quite possibly because of his latent homosexuality -- or heterosexuality, depending on who you ask. Stravinsky was horribly addicted to all kinds of medications.  Contrary to popular belief, Miss Holiday was hardly the only one on a landscape of creative individuals that drank, smoked pot, did drugs and led what many consider to be a tragic life.  (Charles Mingus? Louis Armstrong? Bessie Smith? What black jazz musician led a life that wasn't tragic in some way?) Everyone had their fair share of misery but for some strange reason, no one else's addictions are listed before their achievements.  Probably because of the media hype that sensationalizes every foul aspect of What Happened To Her -- along with that ridiculous, cockamamie biopic starring Diana Ross -- we are left to view her as a hapless victim. No one seems particularly interested in focusing on her accomplishments, which are nothing short of incredible.

 Well. I'm interested.

Join me next week at Minton's, where my April residency in tribute to Lady Day continues. For more information, click here.

Billie Holiday Post Script 1: Holiday on Broadway

On Tuesday night at Minton's Harlem, I stood in a room that Billie Holiday herself performed in many times and I recreated her 1948 Broadway revue to a packed and attentive house with some of the best musicians I know. And I did it on her 100th birthday.

It doesn't get any better than that.

Thank you, Julia Collins for saying yes to my ideas, thank you Talvin Wilks for grounding and shaping the work, thank you Jeremy Bacon for those flawless charts and thank you Charles Goold, Noah Jackson, Wayne Tucker and Patience Higgins for playing the living daylights out of this music. (And thank you Jett Drolette for photographing us all night!) If you were a part of the audience, thank you for celebrating Miss Holiday's 100th birthday with us. I hope you had as much fun as we did.

Next week on Tuesday April 14th --using sound bites, personal letters, rare news clippings and reviews, and yes, her music -- we will reimagine Lady Day's last Carnegie Hall performance in November of 1956.

See you there.

Happy birthday, Billie Holiday...!

      (Photo by Mito Habe-Evans.)

Today is Billie Holiday's 100th birthday. Imagine that.

To celebrate her centennial, I will be in residence every Tuesday in April at Minton's performing rare sides with a stellar coterie of musicians: Noah Jackson (bass), Charles Goold (drums), Warren Smith (drums), Patience Higgins (tenor sax), Wayne Tucker (trumpet) and J. Walter Hawkes (trombone), with Jeremy Bacon (piano and MD).  Thankfully, Talvin Wilks has joined us to shape what we've assembled. I've been working on several projects about Billie Holiday for some time now, so my research is extensive.  This residency feels like a natural extension of all that work, a highly creative way to get all those ideas out of my head and into the world.

Of course, rare sides means rare songs, so the audience will definitely experience material they've probably never heard in performance. I took this idea one step further and reconfigured different aspects of Lady Day's body of work, to see her in a new light. For tonight's special moment, I will recreate her Broadway debut Holiday on Broadway -- a revue that included Billy Taylor, the founder of Jazzmobile --  which opened on April 27, 1948 in the wake of her first Carnegie Hall performance.

I know that there are many who dismiss Miss Holiday as a drug addict who led a tragic life but the truth is, that could be the byline for just about any successful, brilliant musician in the past 100 years. Nevermind all the jazz musicians that are infamous for their drug fueled debauchery and their tragic lives -- Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk. Stravinsky, as it turns out, was quite the drug addict.  Chopin was addicted to opium and dosed it every day with sugar cubes.  Leonard Bernstein? Painkillers. 

It's very difficult (read: virtually impossible) for the world to openly acknowledge black female genius, to say that black women are brilliant.  Focusing on Lady Day's drug use and the things that went wrong in her life is a convenient way to ignore her musicianship and how it literally changed the world.  Consider this: She got her first paid singing job at 14. John Hammond discovered her at 18.  By the time she was 25, she had recorded well over 120 songs with the best jazz musicians of our time -- most of which are classics now.  She toured with Artie Shaw, Count Basie and Teddy Wilson's big bands.  Impossible but true: She recorded Strange Fruit in 1939 at the age of 22. (!!!) 

This is the Billie Holiday I have come to know and respect -- and yes, love: an exceptionally beautiful, disturbingly brilliant, highly creative genius musician and songwriter who was as tough as any situation demanded, because that's just how vulnerable she really was.

If you want to celebrate Billie Holiday on the day of her birth, we'll see you tonight at Minton's. For reservations and information, please click here.

Queen Esther Sings Billie Holiday -- Minton's in April

Queen Esther Sings Billie Holiday: The Rare Sides
A different program each week!

Every Tuesday in April
Sets at 7:30pm and 9:30pm
$10 at the bar — $20 at the table

Minton’s Harlem
206 W. 118^th St.
for info/reservations 212 243 2222

April 7th    Holiday on Broadway
In honor of Billie Holiday’s centennial (April 7, 1915 – April 7, 2015), Queen Esther recreates the program from Lady Day’s Broadway debut Holiday on Broadway, which opened on April 27th, 1948 in the wake of her first Carnegie Hall appearance.

April 14th   Queen Esther Sings Billie Holiday at Carnegie Hall, 1956: A Refracted Set
Using personal letters, soundbites and interview segments from Lady Day herself, Queen Esther puts a refracted spin on Miss Holiday’s last Carnegie Hall performance, giving the audience a new perspective on the greatest jazz siren of the 20^th century.

April 21^st and 28^th   The Billie Holiday Project
With the relatively unknown yet timeless songs of the iconic siren Billie Holiday as an aural backdrop for several newly unearthed Zora Neale Hurston short stories from the height of the Harlem Renaissance – including Monkey Junk, an uptown “fable” of Black city life and an instant classic – Queen Esther explores new ground by giving this unexplored material a fresh perspective.

This presentation will be followed by a set of rare sides.

Friday the 13th #1: Photoshoot!

Because Friday the 13th happens three times this year -- and won't happen again for another 11 years! --  I thought it would be fun to do something momentous for each one.  I'm not superstitious but I know way too many specifics about my Southern rural traditions, and I have sense enough to respect them.  Everybody's got their thing.  Such is life.

It's interesting to mark the days this way, with art that I make or ideas that catch me off guard.  This moment came together with photographer Steven Rosen so effortlessly, it felt like fate.  Steven was the one who took this portrait of me at the Jazz Age Lawn Party last year.  This photo captures the ethereal, timeless, elegant nature of the event -- and me! -- so completely, that asking him to shoot me for the April residency was a no-brainer.

I will be in residence at Minton's Harlem every Tuesday in April, with a program I've created that is dedicated to delving into unknown facets of Billie Holiday's body of work.  Every week, I will present a different idea, with unexpected results. What's especially exciting is that 2015 is her centennial year and the first Tuesday of the residency -- April 7th -- is her birthday.

I have been thinking about the visuals for this project for a long time, mostly because I was in the process of shaping my own image and I knew that it would bend its way onto this idea whether I wanted it to or not.  I wanted something simple and austere, yet elegant and beautiful -- mood-inducing stuff -- because ultimately,  I should look the way the music sounds. But it's bigger than that. I can no longer have anyone look at me and think of anyone else except me. And that's WAY more difficult than it sounds. 


Here's an out-take. And just in case you were wondering: I'm wearing a Byron Lars silver hobble dress, I did my own hair and make-up, and yes, I styled it myself.

For information about the April residency at Minton's Harlem and/or to make reservations, please call 212 243 2222.

I know there are a lot of people who will be looking for gardenias in my hair or an imitative send-up of her more popular material, because quite a few of those people have approached me whenever I sing any Holiday standard with a peony on my head.  Sometimes they say the oddest things, like how my flower is on the wrong side of my head or how I don't sound like Billie Holiday at all or how I must listen to a lot of Carmen McRae or Nina Simone or whoever their favorite black female jazz singer is.  I love peonies. I think they're a gigantic burst of color to my soul. I think they wake up something in me whenever I wear them. But I can't wear them anymore.

I have absolutely no intentions of turning myself into Lady Day for a month.  Miss Holiday herself got tired of that flower and those songs long before she passed away, and made a point of moving past them with resolve when the rest of the world refused to do so.  My question is, what about the rest of her work?

I hope that everyone is as interested in her rare sides as I am -- those songs that were hits back in the day but don't get a lot of attention, here and now.

See you in April. 

Make Cool Art!

I am eternally grateful that I get to make the art -- and create the imagery! -- that I want to see in the world.  At the moment, there's plenty of auditions and callbacks and gigs (oh, my!) and time must be spent honing all the tools in the proverbial toolbox (voice lessons, piano lessons, on camera acting lessons, etc) As for what I'm making: there's a new song cycle in the works,  I'm developing a jazz musical (The Billie Holiday Project) and I've finally started Georgette, the twang-drenched, feminist, country & western band of my dreams. 

Click here for what I'm up to in February -- and here's a heads up for what's happening in April.

• Uncharted: Georgette, featuring Lee Ann Westover and Queen Esther -- April 9th, 8pm.  Country comes to the Village. Yes, there will be a house concert deep in the heart of Billyburg in late March and yes, we'll get to you via Concert Window if you can't get to us.  We're on Facebook! For tickets, click here.
• Queen Esther Sings Billie Holiday: The Rare Sides at Minton's Harlem -- every Tuesday in April.  With direction from Talvin Wilks and music direction from Jeremy Bacon, a different program will be presented each evening -- including an abbreviated version of The Billie Holiday Project -- to illuminate unexplored facets of Lady Day.  For more information: 212 243 2222.

Pick Up The Pieces

As I get my priorities in order and piece together the rest of the year, this song by the Average White Band is on permanent repeat in my head, so I thought I'd share.  Somehow, through a flurry of to do lists, phone calls and flow charts,  everything is taking shape in this effortless way that smells like a promise foretold.  Winter is the perfect moment to hibernate, work on new ideas, work on self.  I've got a new cookbook, a new blank book, I'm re-reading books on music publishing.   I submitted songs to the IMAs and the ISC.  No matter how much I practice, it's never enough.

I'm clocking 6 miles and 20 flights of stairs every day on my fitbit. To get this chunk off of my midsection, I'm going to have to double those numbers and eat clean. I need new ASICS running shoes and my mornings in the gym until spring to pull that off.  A ten week timetable is doable. The dental surgery I've been putting off will even things out. So will a month of unlimited yoga. 

Talk about eating clean: I'm doing the winter farm share from the Corbin Hill Food Project -- and I got a lamb share, too.

And then there's the banjo in the living room that's on permanent loan from Mike that won't stop glaring at me because I haven't touched it in forever. So that's it -- I'm getting cheap weekly lessons, I'm going to touch it all the time. Clawhammer, here I come.

My Baby Taylor hasn't let me down yet. I used it to write my next album -- which is done, more or less.  More songs keep churning out of me, though.  I want to record, mix and master it before the end of the year, no matter what. A spring 2016 release would be ideal. I'll be in Europe on tour in March, God willing.  In the meantime, I'm a performing musician with HAI, working on a set of holy blues and learning how to sing all over again. At least that's the way it feels these days.

Hilliard Greene promised me music theory lessons.  The junk room is starting to look like a junk room. I want to try the tasting menu at Minton's.  I have to go down south to see my Godbabies.  I need a backup pair of my favorite Sam Edelman pumps, in black.  The wine rack in our bar is completely empty.  I have to get a Fender Strat, for the road.

I have to pick up the pieces.

The Wednesday Night Residency at Minton's Continues!

The JC Hopkins Biggish Band in action at Minton's. Photo by Gabi Porter

Every Wednesday since last May, the JC Hopkins Biggish Band has been seriously tearing it up at a newly-revived Harlem hot-spot called Minton's -- the place where be-bop was born.  Thankfully, we get to keep that ball rolling into 2015.   With six horns, a rhythm section and a very grand piano, it's not exactly a big band.  We swing hard, though. Some of the hottest players in the city are in that band, gliding through beautiful arrangements of unexpected standards and original songs that shine.

Charles Turner is a wonder.  Strangely, we sound like we've always sung together. 

Sit at the bar and have a drink and let the music embrace you. Dance, if you like. And yes, the Lowcountry cuisine is kind of fantastic.

“The birthplace of bebop, Minton’s on 118th Street, has been reborn as a venue that is as classy as it is historic. The long-neglected room has now been remodeled into one of the most attractive venues in the city, with a menu that puts most Midtown clubs to shame. The combination of pianist-bandleader JC Hopkins and vocalist Queen Esther expertly recapture the vitality and energy of Harlem jazz and blues of 70 years ago without slavishly imitating anyone and are thus a perfect fit, and they should help the relaunched room attract the attention of dancers as well as diners.” — The Wall Street Journal

Minton’s — 206 W. 118th Street at St. Nicholas
Doors open at 6:00pm.
Performances at 7pm – 11pm.
Music charge: $10 at the bar, $20 at a table.
Dinner reservations are recommended.

For more information: 212 243 2222

Happy New Year!

I slid sideways into the new year, starting on New Year's Eve Eve when I sang at Lincoln Center to a packed house (with a line out the door, down the street and around the corner!) with the JC Hopkins Biggish Band.

Here we are at a well-attended soundcheck in the Lincoln Center Atrium.

From there, I sprinted downtown to The DL for The Salon's annual New Year's Eve Eve fete. (That was a sold-out situation -- three floors, over 50 performers, two orchestras, lots of burlesque. Crazy.) 
Thankfully, I left after my set so I could sing my heart out at Minton's (which was filled to capacity) with the Biggish the following night.  The band was all the way live.  Truth be told, the party we were having onstage was as hot if not hotter than the party in the room -- or next door at The Cecil, which had its own boogie down going with The Kennedy Administration and their New Year's Eve party, Forgive and Forget. Somewhere in there, Jazzmeia Horn gave birth to a baby girl -- after 40 hours of labor.  (WOW!!!) 

Needless to day, I slept until I could sleep no more. After a long movie with MPB (The Hobbit), a long walk and some righteous, incredibly unpedestrian Chinese food, I felt recalibrated.  I'm shifting my life around in bold ways, shaking new ideas loose and reconfiguring my goals and priorities for the year in weekly/monthly increments. Its easy to get lost in all of the pop and verve in my head if everything is all over the place.

I'm going to start this year by breaking some bad habits and creating new ones. Once upon a time, scientists believed that it took 21 days to create a good habit. As it turns out, it can take anywhere from 2 to 8 months.  A habit takes time to stick and how long that takes depends on the individual, amongst other things.  Commit to the process will have to be my mantra.

The first thing on tomorrow's agenda? Running shoes.