Music: 50 years after her death, Holiday celebrated at Kimmel

Every jazz singer who has emerged over the past half-century owes some debt to Billie Holiday. For

Lizz Wright

, one major IOU was drawn up on the stage of the Hollywood Bowl in 2002, when her appearance at a Holiday tribute concert essentially jump-started her career.

In a Los Angeles Times article the following year, writer Don Heckman asserted that Wright "walked on stage at the Hollywood Bowl last summer a virtual unknown. Fifteen minutes later, she walked off a star."

In the days leading up to that performance, however, Wright was not concentrating on making a name for herself. She was merely listening, intently and intimately, seeking the heart of one of music's great vocalists.

"I went through a very intense personal process with her voice, her music and her spirit," Wright said. "I remember spending days just listening to her voice and trying to get past the sadness. For some reason I have a very empathic response to her voice, and I feel brokenhearted when I listen to it over and over. But after a while, I could really hear the beauty and the mastery of her style."

Wright will revisit Holiday's music and influence this weekend, kicking off the Kimmel Center's season-long tribute commemorating the 50th anniversary of Lady Day's death. She'll join the trio led by pianist Danilo Pérez, curating his sixth Jazz Up Close series for the Kimmel.

"One of the things that we always look for is a way of combining performances with education," Pérez explained from Boston, where he is on faculty at Berklee College of Music and the New England Conservatory. "We want to acknowledge the great art form that is jazz, so every year we look for that one person who will give us a variety of topics and stories."

Over the course of five nights, tomorrow through May, a half-dozen singers spanning styles and generations will celebrate several facets of Holiday's legend: Chicago's Kurt Elling will bring the cool (and, said Pérez, "break the stereotype" of female singers) with a performance dubbed "Swing Brother Swing"; Sheila Jordan will appear under the title"Sophisticated Lady," a term that could apply equally to the brilliant octogenarian herself as well as the honoree; "Lady in Satin Goes Latin" features Chilean singer Claudia Acuña; and "Back in Your Own Backyard" pairs two rising Philadelphians, Denise King and Venissa Santi.

The theme for the opening concert, "Strange Fruit," pays homage to one of Philadelphia-born Holiday's best-known songs, a chilling evocation of violence against blacks in the pre-civil-rights-era South.

"It's a seminal piece," Pérez said. "It condemned racism in America, especially the lynching of African-Americans in the South. The fact that she came out and sang about that was very important and influential. She changed the art of pop vocals forever."

But Pérez has reasons for highlighting the song beyond its musical and historical importance. Holiday's accompanist on the 1939 track was Sonny White, a pianist who hailed from Pérez's native Panama.

"That's very important to me," he said, "because when people talk about Latin Jazz, they seem to only mean Afro-Cuban jazz. This is another relevant document that testifies that Latinos have been very important in the development of jazz as jazz, not only so-called Latin Jazz. It acknowledges that there are collaborations between Latinos and North Americans that didn't have to have a conga or a cowbell."

While the series casts the spotlight on vocalists, Pérez is quick to point out Holiday's influence on instrumentalists, and bemoaned the fact that younger musicians tend to shun working with singers.

"My father was a singer, so I grew up with a love and respect for vocals. For me, the most important instrument is the voice. It makes me sad, because there was a very big relationship between how instrumentalists phrased a melody because of their experiences working with these amazing singers.

"One of the best examples of how to express the lyrics through a horn was Lester Young, who was one of Billie Holiday's main collaborators. I think that lyrical quality has been lost."

The series is intended to celebrate Holiday's life, but it does commemorate her tragic death from substance abuse, which has become such a major part of her legend that it inevitably colors discussion and interpretation of her music.

"She had a very rough life," Pérez said with a sigh. "When she sings, I can hear her struggling with all the things she was going through. At times you forget she's singing, she's just telling you a story. I still feel like I was learning more about her than about singing."

Wright said about her studies of Holiday: "I feel that if she were able to talk to me at the time, she probably would have encouraged me to just live a good life, that I could sing with meaning and intensity without going through so much. The resilience of the human spirit is amazing, and she's an example of that."

Perelman Theater, Kimmel Center, Broad and Spruce streets, 8 p.m. tomorrow, $32-$38, 215-893-1999, www.kimmel

center.org. Also see the Web site for the full Jazz Up Close schedule.