While Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, and Ben Vereen sometimes made it into high budget films, most black actors, writers and directors had access only to low-budget Blaxploitation films such as Cotton Comes to Harlem, Shaft, Superfly, and Blacula (the film Sounder, although low budget, was a stylistic exception). In the early 1970s, the most “progressive” thing one might say about the US film industry is that it was an era of heightened tokenism. While they share some familiar cultural tropes, both are reflective of the eras in which they were created. Billie Holiday, TST, March 2021) and 2022 marks the 50th anniversary of Lady Sings the Blues (I’ll abbreviate as LSTB). Last year brought us The United States Versus Billie Holiday (I’ll abbreviate as USVBH) (“ The History Behind The United States vs. No surprise, then, that she has inspired twice as many feature films as any other jazz musician and that the history is shaky in both. Knowledgeable jazz people who want accurate history are advised to watch documentaries–feature films are for myth-making and one of the clearest personifications of jazz mythology is Billie Holiday. While there’s a special place in cinematic hell reserved for characters portrayed as trumpet players (“ The Trumpeter’s Cinematic Curse,” TST, August 2019), the perennial theme of feature films about jazz musicians is the dance between art and tragedy- Young Man With a Horn, Bolden, Round Midnight, Bird, Miles Ahead, Born To be Blue…
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