A new Billie Holiday documentary prompts a look at the films that best capture the spirit of the jazz greatsThe first thing anyone ever heard in the movies was jazz – in cinema’s first sound film, The Jazz Singer, of course, a creaky 1927 backstage drama that now only really has historical-milestone status to recommend it.
(It’s on Amazon if you’re curious.) By now, happily, the cinema of jazz is a sophisticated, richly stocked subgenre, with British director James Erskine’s Billie (Barbican Cinema on demand) the latest addition.The tumultuous life and death of Billie Holiday has long demanded a major documentary study, and Erskine’s film digs in with the advantage of a vast, hitherto unheard interview archive: candid testimonies from friends and associates such as Count Basie and Tony Bennett, recorded in the 1970s by the late journalist Linda Lipnack Kuehl, for a planned biography that never came to pass.
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