Showing results for "Jazz" in Women

No singer has been more mythologized and more misunderstood than jazz legend Billie Holiday, who helped to create much of the mystique herself with her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues - and this authentic biography sets the record straight.

Born in March 1896, Nancy Cunard was a great beauty, rich, promiscuous, with a mesmeric effect on men. She was also highly intelligent, reading widely and writing poetry. Of Nancy's many affairs the five included in this audiobook are the ones with the American poet Ezra Pound, the novelists Aldous Huxley and Michael Arlen (who characterised her as Iris Storm in his best-selling novel The Green Hat), Louis Aragon (the real founder of the Surrealist movement) and finally and controversially the black American pianist Henry Crowder, with whom she ran her printing press in Paris.

Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996) possessed one of the twentieth century's most astonishing voices. Historian Judith Tick offers a sublime portrait of this ambitious risk-taker whose exceptional musical spontaneity made her a transformational artist. Becoming Ella Fitzgerald clears up long-enduring mysteries. Archival research and in-depth family interviews shed new light on the singer's difficult childhood, the tragic death of her mother, and the year she spent in a girls' reformatory school—where she sang in its renowned choir and dreamed of being a dancer.

Following in the grand tradition of such Irish memoirs as Angela’s Ashes and Are You Somebody?, Liam Clancy relates his life’s story in a raucously funny and star-studded account of moving from provincial Ireland to the bars and clubs of New York City, to the cusp of fame as a member of Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers.

In this brave and shocking memoir, the author masterfully guides us through the pivotal points of her life, from an abusive upbringing that destroys her self-confidence, to the wreckage of an ill-conceived marriage, and on to a defining moment, full of grace and mercy, which gave her the wings to become the conquering and triumphant phoenix she is today.

Billie Holiday: Jazz Singer is a full-length biography about Billie Holiday from her birth in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to her childhood in Baltimore, Maryland, through her 30-year career by Meredith Coleman McGee.

Indiana-born Vivian Gordon fluttered to New York in 1920 looking for fame and fortune. Before long, the flame-haired chorus girl parlayed her youth, beauty, and ambition into more profitable means as a tough and glamorous symbol of Prohibition-era excess. She was a speakeasy owner, blackmailer, high-end escort, extortionist, racketeer, and con woman. But given her dangerously intimate associations, Vivian was also a woman who knew too much and who rightfully feared for her life.

Hätte Doris Robinson ihre damals 18 jährige Freundin Sarah Vaughan nicht dazu geraten 1942 im Apollo Theater bei einem Amateurwettbewerb teilzunehmen, wäre der Welt eine der wohl markantesten und eindrucksvollsten Stimmen des Jazz entgangen. An jenem geschichtsträchtigen Abend, wo Sarahs Talent erkannt wurde, begann eine beispiellose Karriere, wie Amerika sie zuvor kaum gesehen hatte. Folgen Sie uns zu den schönsten Klängen des Jazz und lassen Sie sich erzählen, wer Sarah Vaughan war. Wen sie liebte, mit wem sie stritt und wer am Ende ihrer langen Karriere ihr wahres Glück bedeutete.

New York City in the Jazz Age was host to a pulsating artistic and social revolution. Uptown, an unprecedented explosion in Black music, literature, dance, and art sparked the Harlem Renaissance. While the history of this African-American awakening has been widely explored, one chapter remains untold: The story of a group of women collectively dubbed “Miss Anne.” Kaplan’s formidable work remaps the landscape of the 1920s, and alters our perception of this historical moment.

Am 15. Juni 1996 verstummte für einen kurzen Augenblick die Welt. Die Königin des Jazz, Ella Jane Fitzgerald, hatte für immer die Augen geschlossen. Eine Frau, die die Welt mit ihrer Drei-Oktaven-Stimme bewegt hatte. Die Frau, die von ganz unten kam, und sich in die Herzen der Menschen sang. Ihr Leben war wie der wahr gewordene amerikanische Traum. Am 25. April 1917 in Newport News, Virginia in bitterer Armut geboren und von ihrer schweren Kindheit gezeichnet, gelang ihr das, was den meisten Menschen versagt bleibt: der märchenhafte Durchbruch, der zu einer steilen, weltweiten Karriere auf unzählige Bühnen der Welt und des Fernsehens führte.