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Features Song Lyrics for Billie Holiday feat. Lester Young's Billie Holliday With Lester Young: Lady Day & Prez 1937-1941 album.
By 13 March, suffering from stabbing pains in the stomach, he returned to New York. On the transatlantic flight, as the varicose veins in his oesophagus split, he started vomiting blood. Surviving an agonising eight-hour trip, Lester arrived at his New York hotel, the Alvin, and resumed drinking in his room, which faced Birdland. After sinking into unconsciousness, he momentarily awoke, sluggishly moving his fingers and lips as if playing the saxophone. Then he slipped away. And just last year, the Afro-American poet Kamau Daaoud recorded Balm of Gilead (for Billie Holiday and Lester Young) for his album Leimert Park. Today Daaoud explains that their friendship arose from this common understanding of the nature of the world that they lived, and the nature of the pain they had to struggle through to do what they had to do.
Billie Holiday and Lester Young are fine examples of artists who have personal lives that are chaotic and constantly unstable. They understand that their best love can only consumated with each other through making music in a studio. This album is the evidence of that regularly consumated affair. It's clear how Holiday and Young bring out the best in each other as they trade back and forth through these songs. In the recording studio the couple could defy the chaos of their lives and transcend the everyday
Lester Young and Billie Holiday were the Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris of the jazz world. The music the two of them made together was so achingly beautiful and so perfectly in synch it seemed impossible that they were not lovers. As with Gram and Emmylou, the exact nature of their relationship remains somewhat enigmatic. Young was the one who gave the nickname "Lady Day" to Holiday and she in turn called him "Prez".
