Yes, if there were to be an Ernest Hemingway of the female jazz vocal world circa 1933-1959 (the bookends of her recording career), it would have to be Billie. You could also rely upon other men to appreciate her talents. She was a reliable topic of conversational bonding, like football or roads. “Ah, Billie Holiday,” you’d say to yourself after spying a copy of The Real Lady Sings the Blues in someone’s record collection. “He’s sensitive, caring and anti-racist, just like me.”And, importantly, Billie had gravitas. We could play Billie’s records when we wanted to feel down and depressed; or to try and impress prospective partners with our soulfulness and sensitivity. Now the radio series, produced by Sarah Cropper, is to become a live event as part of the Barbican’s Only Connect season in London.

Billie and Me, to be performed on the evening of Monday 5 April (two days before Billie’s birthday), looks like quite a show, too. Neneh Cherry repeats her presenter’s role as the MC, and the guest vocalists lining up to pay tribute include Fontella Bass, Angelique Kidjo, Amy Winehouse, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Carleen Anderson, Yolande Bavan, Susheela Raman and Meshell Ndegeocello. The band is led by jazz drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, and there will be film and audio clips plus readings by Farah Griffin, Holiday’s feminist-revisionist biographer. There was more of the same for close to three hours, but oddly enough, only brief snatches of Billie Holiday’s music, perhaps for fear that it sounded old and scratchy. Yes, she liked “to party”, but hadn’t her single-parent mother “lived life in the fast lane”? Up to now, only men had tried to tell her story – and they don’t understand the struggles of women artists like women do. She was a phenomenal woman, said Maya Angelou, who created “a new conception of black womanhood” She was “God’s spirit”. “What if I told you that she was one of my most important role models…

one of the greatest feminists and political activists of the 20th century; what would you think then?” In the six programmes that followed, the all-female cast of interviewees (including, rather surprisingly, Joan Baez, Emmylou Harris, Suzanne Vega and Tori Amos) talked about Billie Holiday as a racial revolutionary and spokeswoman for womankind; about her beauty, her dignity, her free spirit and how, if she were alive today, she would have changed the world. The art and the life are also indivisible, and you can’t help reading one through the lens of the other. With Billie, the poetry really is in the pity.But these days, there’s a growing tendency to accentuate the positive; to celebrate Billie’s life by reclaiming her from the tragedy that characterised it (a tragedy that was as much a part of her act as the microphone and the piano player); to exchange troubling thoughts for improving moral messages. For like Sylvia Plath, Billie Holiday has become a feminist icon, a kind of black-hipster cross between Joan of Arc and Princess Diana, Mother Teresa and Clare Short. And just as Social Services agencies now prefer to talk about “survivors” of domestic violence rather than victims, so the new Billie is not a victim but a survivor Except, of course, that Billie Holiday didn’t survive. Had she done so, she’d be 89 next week.”What if I said to you that Billie Holiday is my hero?” asked the singer Neneh Cherry in the introduction to last year’s Radio 2 series, Billie and Me. Together with Frank Sinatra (on whose mature style she proved a decisive influence), Billie Holiday is the greatest popular vocalist of the 20th century.