Richard Brody on John Szwed’s new book, “Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth”:
In general, the desire of even the most discerning critics, such as Szwed, to separate art and life, to analyze the formal traits of works as if they were dissociable from the experience and the emotions that inspire them and that they convey, is both noble and doomed—noble, because artists deserve to be honored for their achievements, and doomed, because the formal and systematic nature of those achievements isn’t what makes them endure. The individuality, the immense complexity of inner life that art conveys—including Holiday’s seemingly straightforward and instantly appreciable art—doesn’t occur in a laboratory-like isolation.
Photograph by Charles Hewitt / LIFE / Getty