Billie Holiday wanted her voice to sound like the “big feeling” Louis Armstrong breathed into his horn. When she first recorded Strange Fruit in 1939 – a song written for her about black lynchings, which became a protest anthem – her producer Milt Gabler later recalled that she “attacked the words and could swing like a trumpet player”.
In a warehouse in Adelaide, South Australia, the actor Zahra Newman has mastered an uncanny approximation of that untrained but iconic voice in preparation for her role in Lanie Robertson’s 1986 cabaret Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill.
