The jazz cognoscenti spend a lot of time feeling misunderstood, and sometimes they secretly enjoy it. But few things make jazz-lovers groan louder, and with more justice, than media enthusiasm for heartache, heroin and horror stories from jazz life. Sarah Cropper, the British musician and radio producer, triumphantly explored an alternative recently with the BBC radio-doc series Billie and Me - a reappraisal of Billie Holiday as a positive, complex, life-embracing genius rather than the usual tragic victim. The show was rousingly reworked as a concert in the Barbican's Only Connect series on Monday.
Thirteen female guest artists performed singly, in duets and finally all together before a punchy supporting band showcasing excellent Memphis saxophonist Kirk Whalum and pianist Mitch Forman, driven and directed by Terri Lyne Carrington on drums. Neneh Cherry and academic Farah Jasmine Griffin narrated, and powerful images of Holiday - many showing her as a working musician at ease with star contemporaries like Lester Young and Count Basie - appeared behind the performers.
Reinventing Holiday's contribution as an ecstatic clamour of gratitude rather than the familiar whispered heartbreak undoubtedly turned the evening over to a great deal of storming contemporary funk, with Dee Dee Bridgewater's chillingly entranced account of Strange Fruit being one of the rare visits to the haunting and dangerous slow lyricism that was central to Holiday's work. The point was not Holiday mimicry, but a celebration of her life through the lives of working female performers today, doing what they do best.
Amy Winehouse and Lalah Hathaway respectively contributed edgy urgency and stately soulfulness to Ain't Nobody's Business, and Carleen Anderson sang with awesomely controlled soul and blues power all evening, particularly on Fine and Mellow. Holiday's friend Yolande Bavan came closest to the star's fragility with a delicately moving For All We Know.
Dee Dee Bridgewater blew the roof off twice in the first half - on I Hear Music and Lover Come Back to Me - with the jazziest and most instrument-like virtuosity of all the singers, and Angelique Kidjo and the electric bassist Meshell Ndegeocello clattered exhilaratingly through a drum'n'bass account of The Man I Love. The finale brought everybody on, swapping phrases through the gospelly Travellin'. The collective roar from the audience had to struggle to match a tour de force of an ending.
