Billie Holiday

With her silky green dress catching the early afternoon breeze and her voice soaring strong above it, Debbie Poole serenaded Baltimore yesterday. On Saturday, the Reisterstown FedEx worker claimed the top prize in the Mayor's Billie Holiday Vocal Competition, an annual event in which singers conjure the spirit of the late jazz legend whom Baltimore claims as its own. This is the 16th year of the tribute, and the first where it was held as part of...

TODAY Big band concert Baltimore's Big Band will present a free outdoor concert today at Carroll Park, Washington Boulevard and Bayard Street. In addition, the band will perform Tuesday at 3935 Hilton Road in Ashburton; Wednesday at 600 Conway St. in Ridgley's Delight; and Friday at Penn Avenue and Laurens Street in Upton. All concerts are scheduled to start at 6:30 p.m. Firefighters' carnival Deale Volunteer Fire Department and Rescue Squad will hold a carnival from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. at 6007 Drum Point Road.

With Billie By Julia Blackburn. Pantheon Books. 354 pages. $25. A young woman named Linda Kuehl jumped out of a hotel window in Washington on a snowy night in January 1979. Among the things she left behind were taped interviews with about 150 people who knew, or claimed to know, Billie Holiday, along with a jumble of police records, shopping lists, royalty statements and similar ephemera from the life of the nonpareil jazz singer. Kuehl could never form her raw research into the biography she hoped to write of Holiday, who grew up in Baltimore and first began to sing here.

Billie Holiday Festival Billie Holiday fans celebrate the turbulent life and brief career of the jazz vocalist this weekend. Holiday, who spent most of her younger days trying to make ends meet in Baltimore, will be remembered with big-band performances and live renditions of her music. Former winners of the Mayor's Billie Holiday Vocal Contest will also perform. A jazz vocal workshop for all ages will be offered Sunday. The annual Billie Holiday Music Festival will be held Saturday at New Haven Lounge in the Northwood Shopping Center, 1552 Havenwood Road, 9 p.m.-1:30 a.m. The festival continues Sunday 3 p.m.-7 p.m. with a vocal workshop at the Eubie Blake Museum and Cultural Center, 847 N. Howard St. The event is free on Saturday and costs $10 on Sunday for the workshop.

We all know the lady sang the blues. And by numerous accounts, Billie Holiday lived them, too: raped as a girl, a prostitute by age 14, an addict most of her adult life. If we are to believe her many biographers, the artist, to paraphrase author Zora Neale Hurston, seemed to believe that nature had given her a "lowdown dirty deal" and her "feelings were all hurt about it." So all of that pain, all of that bitterness and sorrow dammed up in Holiday's soul came through whenever she stepped before a microphone to sing.

Here's to memory lanes less traveled, images of a black-and-white era that colorfully come alive whenever Fritz Pollard III thinks back to the days of his pioneering grandfather. Those were the days, the Germantown resident says, when Fritz Pollard Sr. was known for the company he kept: Sports and entertainment legend Paul Robeson? Pollard played with him. Multi-sport great Jim Thorpe? Pollard played against him. Jazz stars Billy Eckstine, Billie Holiday and Dizzy Gillespie? Pollard promoted them.

Shirley Horn holds a cigarette to her lips between gloved fingers. She drags on it deeply, slowly. And when that one is done, she lights another. And another. And another until the pack is empty. Then she calls out to her quiet husband of 49 years, Shep Deering, for more Pall Malls, which he promptly retrieves from another room. The Grammy-winning jazz singer-pianist sits at a card table inside her sparsely furnished living room - surrounded by freshly painted ivory walls, plush Kelly green carpet underfoot.

The woman who started the Billie Holiday Vocal Competition 15 years ago prefers to call the event a concert that offers a lifeline to fledgling performers willing to share their talents. "These performers are not in competition, but in concert with each other," said Ruby Glover, judge at the last 14 events and honoree yesterday. "They are sharing fascinating talent with this audience and hoping to take the next step in their careers." In front of a packed house at Center Stage yesterday, Mayor Martin O'Malley awarded the first-place $1,500 prize to Sara Jones, an Army staff sergeant who belted out a bossa nova in Portuguese.