The great African-American blues singer Billie Holiday will be appearing, magically, as a hologram at the Apollo Theater in Harlem this fall. Although she’s been dead since 1959, the technology will make an amazingly realistic, apparently three-dimensional Billie Holiday sing and chat with the audience.
According to Phys.org , holograms do their magic by recording light fields, rather than simple photo images. This makes it possible to present a three-dimensional figure that can appear to be singing and talking. The Apollo Theater has partnered with a company called Hologram USA to produce the Billie Holiday shows, which will be given in the daytime when many tourists who are visiting New York City make an excursion to see Harlem. Watch the Apollo Theater website to see when they announce the starting date for the Billie Holiday hologram shows.
The hologram concert phenomenon got popular around 2012 when an eerily realistic image of Tupac Shakur was projected on a California stage to perform with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. Other iconic singers who have been magically “brought back to life” by holograms are Michael Jackson and Liberace. Chief Keef was represented by a hologram when he couldn’t appear at a concert because of warrants that were out for his arrest.
Billie Holiday was a jazz and blues singer who wrote many great jazz standards herself, in addition to performing the songs of others.
Holiday began her singing career at the Apollo Theater in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood when she was just 19-years-old. Over the years, she appeared at the Apollo on close to 30 occasions. According to the Guardian , Billie Holiday was finally inducted into the Apollo’s Walk of Fame this spring, 56 years after she died in 1959.
The Apollo Theater’s website announced the Lady Day reincarnation.
“BILLIE HOLIDAY
You know the voice. It’s time to meet the legend.
Coming in Fall 2015
Her voice will touch your heart. Her presence on the Apollo stage will captivate all who witness it. For the first time ever and only in New York City at the Apollo, the magic of holographic technology will transport you to the concert of your dreams as Lady Day takes the stage again.”
Over her career, Billie Holiday sang beautiful, heart-rending renditions of songs like “I Cried For You,” “I Got My Love To Keep Me Warm,” and “A Fine Romance.” Here’s a video of the real Billie Holiday (not the hologram) singing “Fine and Mellow” with musicians Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young. Holiday composed this song and its hauntingly bittersweet lyrics.
It will be amazing to see the performances of the Billie Holiday hologram at the Apollo Theater and to hear the great blues singer as if she is really right in front of us.
[Image Credited to Jason Hickey via Flickr / CC BY 2.0]
