Cue Online (Grahamstown)
Vincent Huck
5 July 2009
Writer and jazz expert Nigel Vermaas heard his first Billie Holiday song when he was 18, shortly after Holiday’s death in 1959 - and he has never stopped listening to her.
“There was something,” he explains carefully, “something that struck me in her voice, an emotional note.”
While some singers tend to overact and blow the emotion out with lights and facial mimics, Holiday preferred simplicity.
“If she had been a piano player, she wouldn’t have used those extra fancy notes,” Vermaas declares, his fingers flying over the table. “No, it was all straight to the point.”
Nevertheless, emotion is always there, just underneath the surface. “That is what made her so special,” he says.
Misunderstood artist
Holiday has been often misrepresented as a victim of the issues she sang about. “She was abused all right, but she was not a victim,” Vermaas corrects.
Except for a few numbers, her songs are not representative of who she was. Although she was an artist with natural talent who burnt her candle at both ends, she was also a woman of jokes and laughter who loved to cook for the entire cast.
On stage, even though “she wasn’t a blues singer, everything she sang was the blues,” says Vermaas.
God Bless the Child is one of Vermaas’s favourite songs because of the way Michele Maxwell interprets it in Do You Know Billie Holiday?
“Michele is a wonderful artist,” he says. “And so is Mwenya Kabwe. They both played an important role in the construction of the play by constantly questioning me.”
In this play, written and directed by Vermaas, Kabwe plays Holiday and Maxwell plays Ellen, her prison warder. The production, which is based on fact, explores the relationship between the two women.
“It is not about Billie Holiday,” Vermaas clarifies. “It is about Ellen and how Billie changed her life.”
The play commemorates the 50th anniversary of Holiday’s death and manifests Vermaas’s love for the artist. As he says it: “I’m not in love with her, I just love her.”
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