Session 44

When Billie Holiday sang “God Bless the Child” at recording session 44 for New York’s Okeh Records, she was not only finally putting a voice to a song she’d written two years earlier with Arthur Herzog, Jr. — she was creating an iconic masterpiece that would define her career and endure far beyond her own 44 years. What creative alchemy turned the singularity of her life experiences into the big band of creative genius? With Holiday’s formative track as our lens, the Bluecoats, in our own 44th production, explore the artist’s experience. Session 44.

With Don Sebesky’s jazz concerto grosso, “Bird and Bela in B-Flat” and Patrick Williams’ “An American Concerto,” we peer into the dream ballet — the dizzy, surreal instants preceding a first performance. Through Joni Mitchell’s collaboration with Charles Mingus, “The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines,” we experience the anxiety and excitement that swirl int he performer’s mind ass a lifetime of creative influences and life experience come together to inform what is to come.

At last, the performer shares her voice, and we are transported from dream to reality. In the Westerlies’ version of the traditional English folk ballad, “Saro,” the audience is invited in to experience the journey from unrequited love and sorrow to joy and hope. Through the crucible of performance, the musician’s creation had been released into the world. A new anxiety takes hold. Will the creation be loved or criticized? Revered or forgotten? Regardless, performer and audience alike can celebrate the shared nature of the musical experience. Wynton Marsalis’s jubilant “Home (from Congo Square") brings us full circle, as we explore the joy of creating and sharing music together.

Billie Holiday’s “God Bless The Child,” conceived after an argument with her mother and finally recorded two years later, became an award-winning hit. Her brilliant exploration of the sacred and the profane has been covered dozens of times by everyone from Aretha Franklin to Blood, Sweat & Tears, and remains the enduring legacy of an iconic artist.

Ultimately, the artist’s experience delivers art from the writer’s table to the audience chair—and, on rare occasion, to a place where it transcends its maker and can stand on its own.