Billie Holiday’s fabled personal crises, the struggles against chemical dependency, sexual abuse and racism, have long threatened to overshadow her Promethean stature as an artist. Now, on the centennial of her birth, John Szwed, a veteran biographer and jazz musician, seeks to redress this imbalance with his valuable “Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth.” Conceived as a “meditation on [Holiday’s] art and its relation to her life,” rather than a straight-ahead biography, Mr. Szwed’s book persuasively reappraises one of the most influential American singers of the 20th century, even if, in the end, it falls short of resolving Holiday’s paradoxes into a cohesive whole.
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