Personally, I think Billie Holiday, while a legend, is over-rated. Sarah Vaughan is the Gold Standard. What do you think?
Sarah-- More talented
Billie-- More heartbreaking, therefore more sublime
Nails it.
Technical skill v. Emotional investment…Billie, hands down.
Among the two, I somehow prefer Sarah Vaughan…)Ella is too much of a technical show, while Sarah is not too bright )
But the one female jazz vocalist that gives me shivers is Carmen Mc Rae!!
Sorry at the attempt of a hijack, but Carmen rules!!!
Billie, more raw emotion.
Fenris
Billie’s great, but the Marsalii School of Bestowing Sainthood on Jazz Artists has gone off the deep end with her.
While I love and respect her talents and it pains me to agree that’s she’s “over-rated” I have to say that WC (snicker) has a point. Not her fault, of course, but the critics’.
And I also agree that Sarah’s a god damn Goddess…that first album of hers…with Clifford Brown and Paul Quinichette and Herbie Mann backing her on trumpet and tenor and flute, and her voice weaving around them like a fourth horn…opening with that magisterial "Lullaby of Birdland! Zowie!
Sarah Vaughn is much more musical. Billie Holliday is tragic and nice but musically not at the level of Sarah.
I think vocally by far the best was Ella. I just wish she would have challenged herself more with her selections. Her early stuff was incredible.
I too like Carmen McRae but she doesn’t do as much for me as Ella.
Any Helen Merrill fans out there? Her collaborations with Gil Evans are mind-blowing…
And of an earlier era (career starting in the mid-1930s), I think Lee Wiley is one of the greatest jazz singers ever.
Billie Holliday, hands down. I love the vocal prowess of Sarah and Ella, but Billie sings the blues. She makes you feel. To me, it’s like comparing Janis Joplin with Christina Aguilera. The skill may be there, but I need the soul.
Etta James is also up there with Billie. “At Last” may be the best blues song ever.
Sarah Vaughan, definitely. She has it all over Billie, who wins only in the “tragic life” stakes. But if you didn’t know their respective histories and you just heard each of them belt out a song (even the same song), I think Sarah would “win” almost every time. Don’t get me wrong, I like Billie; I just like Sarah better.
::: making a mental note about Helen Merrill and Lee Wiley :::
I’d have to go w/ Sarah. She gets points for not killing herself with drugs. She also had a much better range than Billie.
I do agree w/ alot of the previous posts tho; Billie was the quintessential blues singer.
Sarah - inward looking, skills that only other musos appreciate, or care about (doo doo boo doo ad nauseum)
Billie - communicates feelings - to me that’s the point of music
Heard Sarah mutilate and destroy the Bloody Mary part in the crossover South Pacific? Obviously couldn’t care about what everybody else was doing.
Why is Billie overrated anyway? For the same reason that mashed potatoes are over-rated? That is, “no longer so fashionable?”
Also love Carmen, Lee Wiley. Can I add Connie Boswell?
Redboss
SARAH’S----HOW IMPORTANT CAN IT BE?
VS:
BILLIE’S—EMBRACEABLE YOU
Don’t make me choose–just shoot me.
Redboss: It’s not that Billie is “unfashionable”…not when you can go to your corner Starbucks and pick up a compact disc of BILLIE HOLIDAY SINGS COOL RETRO HEPCAT JAZZ STUFF THAT YOU CAN SNAP YOUR FINGERS AND COP AN ATTITUDE TO WHILE YOU DRINK YOUR FIVE-DOLLAR LATTE GRANDE. I’m just opining that she’s been a trifle oversold by the Jazz Establishment over the past ten or fifteen years.
Nacho4Sara: No offense, but if you’ve been listening to Sassy and not heard the soul, you’ve been listening to the wrong Sassy.
While Billie (and Ella) began their careers in the Swing era, Sarah started out with Earl Hines’ big band in the early 1940s…a cradle of modern jazz that also employed Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. On the plus side, this made her the greatest vocalist of the bop generation…on the downside, it means that her prime years fell in the 1950s.
Among the many, many things essayed in the 1950s which seemed meant purely to destroy everything good and right in this life, one of the worst was taking good singers and backing them with shitty arrangements. Lots of soupy strings, for example, and general over-production (cough - Quincy Jones - cough). The idea was to sell vocalists like Sarah and Dinah Washington to the Clydes in Peoria, who liked a lot of brass and winds and shimmering harps a la Jackie Gleason, and not just the jazz buffs.
You may have been tricked by some of these Broadway-like performances. Try the aforementioned EmArcy disc, SARAH VAUGHAN WITH CLIFFORD BROWN, from 1954. Or AFTER HOURS, a 1961 recording with just guitar and bass. It (weirdly) opens with “My Favorite Things,” but by golly that girl manages to inject soul into the lyric “schnitzel with noodles.”
Yeah – although I’ll take Sarah’s version of “Lover Man” over Billie’s any day of the week. Her technical abilities were astounding, and I just loved what she could do with a song.
Billie Holiday could make you feel her pain…but Sarah Vaughan sends shivers up and down my spine.
[slight hijack] I was watching a program on the development of song in the early 20th century, and some talking head was going on about how wonderful and influential Anita O’Day was. They showed a clip of her with Louis Armstrong and I thought “Eh…she’s okay”. And then they showed a concert clip from the early 50’s of her scatting on “Tea for Two”. Holy cow…the woman must have three tongues…
Bessie Smith.
I’m also of the “don’t-make-me-choose” team. In fact, I’d go so far as to say you’re comparing apples and oranges; the mere fact that they recorded some of the songs notwithstanding.
I only own one Vaughn album, the 1954 Clifford Brown recording mentioned above. It’s stunning, so I’ll soon get more.
Both were enormous talents. I tend to think of Billie as more cutting-edge, particularly because of her habit of following the band - that’s perhaps the most critical element of her sound. I also have a soft spot for “difficult” voices, because they’re so expressive - in wildly different contexts, I also love Janis Joplin, Bjork, Sinead and Nina Simone.
. . . Oh, and Libby Holman.
I’ll take the Misses Smith and Holman over Holliday and Vaughan any day. Unless you mean Judy Holliday and Alberta Vaughan . . .
…and Abbey Lincoln, and Holly Cole, and Jo Stafford and… oh heck, I have a soft spot for women singers. Especially Bjork.
My wife and I danced our first wedding reception dance to Dinah Washington singing “All of Me”. (Not live, of course.)
A most difficult question. I have to give the nod to Lady Day on purely sentimental reasons. Sure, Sarah Vaughan may have had a better voice with respect to the technical side of music, but you couldn’t separate Billie Holiday’s voice from her life and that add dimension just gives her the edge, IMHO. When she sounds like she’s been up for 3 straight days, living on black coffee, Camels, a cold, dry roast beef sandwich, and some smack - well, you just can’t fake that and what it brings to her sound. I happen to like her later stuff, when her voice was just shot. Given the total hell she was enduring she could still bring a sense of swing and fun to “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.” “Lady In Satin” isn’t one of my favorites (too syrupy, save the strings for Nelson Riddle and Ella), but she still wins in my book.
And Nina Simone is better than all of them on pure technique, plus she could play the hell out of the piano.