This film is the story of both the great jazz singer Billie Holiday and her biographer Linda Kuehl, a New York journalist. For almost eight years in the 1970s Kuehl immersed herself in Holiday’s life interviewing friends and colleagues including Count Basie, Charles Mingus, and John Hammond. Before she finished her research, Kuehl took her own life. Director James Erskine based this film on Kuehl’s research including notes, transcripts, and over 200 hours of recorded interviews to tell the twin stories of Holiday’s life and Kuehl's obsession with creating a biography of an American jazz icon. Content Warning: Language may be offensive to some viewers.

Billie

Crafted from extraordinary unheard interviews, and restoring key performances into color for the first time, BILLIE is the story of the singer who changed the face of American music, and the journalist who died trying to tell it.

On May 23, 1947, Belleville mayor Frank Folwell cut the ribbon at Club Commodore at the Belleville, Ontario fairgrounds, the now-permanent home of the then-20-year-old Commodores Orchestra.&nbsp;Incredibly, the old chicken-viewing barn had been renovated and winterized by the musicians with their own hands into a million-dollar operation by today’s standards.&nbsp;Band members had each invested the equivalent of $25,000 in a venue whose food service capacity was 400, and in which the Commodores played four and five nights a week for as many as 1500 dancers.&nbsp;All this in a city of just 17,000.&nbsp;It is the legacy of the pure musical passion of a collection of clerks, accountants, carpenters, insurance agents and mechanics who gave life to their musical dream.&nbsp;In recent years, an infusion of Grammy-winning musical talent has ensured the band’s place as the still-swinging ensemble whose name is widely-known and affectionately regarded in eastern and central Ontario.

The Commodores Orchestra: Dance of the Decades

For ninety-two years, the Commodores have been the swingin’ soundtrack to life in Belleville, and THE band for legions of dancers. A big band in a small city whose musicians took hammers in hand and put their money up front to create the longest-operating big swing band in Canada.

Ontario

Billie & The Commodores Orchestra: Dance of the Decades

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Documentary film festival in Belleville Ontario

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