Billie Holiday

Epitomizing as absolutely as does Charlie Parker the saga of the jazz genius as tragic soul, Billie Holiday's biography reads like a Dostoyevsky novel: Raped at 10 years old by a neighbor (some accounts say "cousin"), she was sent to a home for wayward girls; in her teens she spent four months in jail for prostitution. Start-ing as a singer in New York's rough-and-tumble speakeasies of the early '...