The singer Kate Bush called “too good”
Kate Bush is rightfully regarded as one of history’s most influential and interesting vocalists. From the second ‘Wuthering Heights’ came out, Bush had the world hypnotised by her soaring high notes and vocal acrobatics. But the singer that she loved best was at the total opposite end of the spectrum in style and sound.
After her breakout in 1978, Kate Bush was prolific. Her second album was released only nine months later, and by the 1990s, she had seven albums under her belt. It seemed there was no slowing Bush’s creativity down as she moved from concept to concept. Singing about hyper-specific topics, favouring literary references over universal concepts, she’s got songs about shipwrecks, drowning, nuclear war, James Joyce’s Ulysses and beyond.
Bush’s strange world feels a far cry away from the realm of jazz standards. In the jazz world, the most famous songs sing of universal, relatable feelings of love, loss, belonging and pain. It’s so universal, in fact, that it’s most common for jazz singers to perform the work of others rather than write their tracks. Creating the idea of a ‘jazz standard’, a song becomes so popular and so universally understood that it is written into the essential canon of the genre and becomes a track all jazz artists will likely know.
Billie Holiday was no stranger to jazz standards. As a singer, she provided the definitive take on so many jazz classics, including ‘What A Little Moonlight Can Do’, ‘Solitude’ and ‘I’ll Be Seeing You’. With one of the most recognisable and stunning voices in history, it’s no wonder Kate Bush called her “too good.”
“I think Billie Holiday hit me very strongly when I first heard her,” Bush said in 1979. “I just couldn’t believe her voice, I mean it just made me want to cry, it was just amazing. And she’s very strongly Jazz and Blues, but there is something about it that I love.”
In fact, Bush loves Holiday’s voice so much that it makes the iconic singer shut up for a second; “I think Billie Holiday is one of the very few artists whose records I would never join in with while she’s singing. She’s too good. I just couldn’t get near it. I think the reward you get from her is in actually listening to her voice.”
It’s the rich character and feeling you can hear in Holiday’s recordings that appeal to Bush, as she said in 1985, “That is what is so beautiful about her, you can almost hear what she’s been doing for the last three weeks. Her singing is extraordinary, it’s just terrifying, the amount of, well, agony, and yet beauty, which comes out of just that one voice.”
Billie Holiday made the devastating and brutal protest track ‘Strange Fruit’ famous during the height of segregation and the civil rights movement in America. In turn, making her a target of the US Government’s war on drugs, Holiday eventually died in police custody in 1959.
Living a hard life made even harder by racial injustice, the emotion in Billie Holiday’s voice is visceral and hard-earned, which is exactly what made Kate Bush fall in love with it.
