An unflinching look at the mysterious and magnificent Lady Day

Billie (15 cert, 98 min) ★★★★★ Dir James Erskine

‘Ialways wanted to sing like Louis Armstrong played.” To hear this from the mouth of Billie Holiday herself, in one of the few interviews she ever gave, is somehow more of a revelation than reading it. It makes vivid sense of that voice – that unearthly, scratchy instrument – which made her such a nonpareil figure in jazz.

Fans of Lady Day have always objected to the focus on her harrowing life and the implication that her talent was, in the words of activist Angela Davis, “no more than an unconscious and passive product of the contingencies of her life”.

James Erskine’s shivery and searching new documentary, Billie, doesn’t spare us those contingencies – the drug addiction, wild promiscuity, abusive relationships, and career-long struggle to be afforded the same respect as white musicians.

But nor does it present a Holiday who is anyone’s victim, so much as a rebel artist who gave full-throated, utterly conscious expression to her life’s vicissitudes.

The format here is strangely perfect. Erskine presents an oral history based on hundreds of hours of interviews from the Seventies, never made public until now.

Building this archive was the obsessive project of a schoolteacher and part-time journalist called Linda Lipnack Kuehl, who managed to track down a huge number of Holiday’s friends, lovers and collaborators, including Count Basie, Charles Mingus and Tony Bennett. Kuehl died in 1978, in somewhat omewhat murky circumstances, ces, having supposedly jumped from m a hotel room window.

This mystery ery is not one Erskine sets about solving, olving, but it somehow enshrouds the he film with a certain n spookiness, as if an after-image of one life’s tragedy y has been superimposed mposed on another.

Kuehl, whose hose questions we e often hear, has a rare are knack for cutting tting to the quick.

“Let me ask sk you something – did she turn tricks?” ” she asks Holiday’s cousin, usin, John

Fagan, of the e teenage

Billie, to which ich the immediate answer nswer is, “Sure, course. During them times, you had to survive.”

It would be hard to overestimate the difficulties Billie, b born Eleanora Fagan, faced, as she was yanked in and out of p prisons, workhouses, and reform schools thro through her childhoo childhood.

She w was raped by a neigh neighbour when she was 11, and accused of ““seducing” her att attacker, who ser served a mere thr three-month sena sentence. At 17, she was disc discovered by the music producer John Hamm Hammond when he visite visited a tiny Harlem baset basement club. This got her on the road with a su succession of big bands, but in those years she suffered all the indignities Jim Crow could fling at her.

As her drummer Jo Jones puts it: “Billie Holiday did not have the privilege of using a toilet at a filling station.” She was refused lodging at hotels, and wasn’t served food. If one diner made an exception, she’d stash an extra burger in her bag in case she went hungry next time.

These grievances rarely came out, even in private conversation. But they were right there in the music – most famously in Strange Fruit, the astonishing anti-lynching protest song which Holiday first recorded in 1939. Erskine runs in full an excoriating filmed rendition from 1959, the year of her death.

Twenty years earlier, obstacles to recording it were legion. Not only would white audiences regularly walk out mid-performance, but the FBI came after her for persisting with it.

Erskine’s film works on every level: it could just as usefully teach you the basics about Holiday, or give serious fans something to pore over more than once.

Most of all, it’s an inspired way to circle the mystery of Billie Holiday, because of the enigmatic soundworld of these tapes – these voices from the past, squabbling and passionate and sad about the one that blew them all away.

Available on the Barbican website from today and on Amazon/itunes from Monday; barbican.org.uk