Serge Lutens debuts the long awaited Une Voix Noire- an homage to the life of the great jazz/blues singer Billie Holiday whose real name was  Eleanora Gough McKay.  I am including sections from the lengthy press release which reads like a biopic; as if Billie Holiday was narrating her own life from childhood to her battle with addiction; ghosts from her past … the demons that haunted her. And the story of the gardenia flower that was tucked behind her ear.

"Billie’s father, Clarence, was 17 years old. He played the banjo. Her mother, Sadie, was a few years older. What she liked about men was marriage and security. Neither one acknowledged the other. Billie was left alone, entrusted to whoever could take her. Once, when he was between two tours, Clarence suddenly showed up to see her; he told her – despite the lace on her dress – that she should have been a boy. He called her “my lit’l Bill.” Her real name was Eleonora…   

 

Billie Holiday at Orly Airport 1958, she died in 1959

 

When her voice would rise over some velvet drama, my heels would go up. The serge cloth of a straight skirt hobbled my walk. The same jacket made my shoulders look square. Without any Job paper and no more tobacco, I held my cigarette high. In the time it took to sing My Man, I would become Billie, or a chic customer passing through her song. As soon as the needle left the wax, my shoulder straps would collapse like champagne bubbles to the level of my shoulders. My feet were just themselves, flat, resting on the floor of men. The magic didn’t work anymore. The coach turned back into what it should never have stopped being: a pumpkin. But I had caught the bug. I followed my own path, and, so I would recognize myself in it better, I wrote it."

 

 

 

The press release ends with Billie burning her hair with a curling iron and sending her assistant to buy flowers from a girl who sold them at the club where she was singing to hide the burnt spot… They were gardenia  flowers that became her signature.

Then walking onstage to sing: "She led her audience to the verge of tears. I won’t say anything about her voice. Who could speak of her better than her songs?"　 　　　

  

The notes for Une Voix Noire are gardenia, rum and tobacco

Une Voix Noire is available in the US at Barney's flagship /$300 75ml

 

Michelyn Camen, Editor in Chief