Zahra Newman on becoming Billie Holiday: ‘I want people to feel like when they listen to her’
Billie Holiday wanted her voice to sound like the “big feeling” Louis Armstrong breathed into his horn. When she first recorded Strange Fruit in 1939 – a song written for her about black lynchings, which became a protest anthem – her producer Milt Gabler later recalled that she “attacked the words and could swing like a trumpet player”.
In a warehouse in Adelaide, Australia, the actor Zahra Newman has mastered an uncanny approximation of that untrained but iconic voice in preparation for her role in Lanie Robertson’s 1986 cabaret Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill.
Set in a Philadelphia nightclub in 1959, during the last months of Holiday’s life, the jazz singer reminisces on a career that disastrously derailed when she was busted for drug possession in the 1940s but rose triumphant again with her final
