In a new Billie Holiday documentary, friends fill in the missing notes
Dec 16, 2020 10:48 PM EDT In the opening performance of a new documentary, Billie Holiday is mesmerizing in full color. The original, decades-old footage has been colorized for emphasis, like the way her eyebrow arches to punctuate a lyric as she sings. The scene is also a mission statement of sorts: The film, “Billie,” wants to go beyond the black-and-white — and incomplete — narrative of self-destructive jazz artists. Shortly after that opening scene, Sylvia Syms, herself an admired jazz singer and friend of Holiday’s, is heard on tape saying that s...