The Melbourne International Festival of the Arts 1999
The Prince of Wales Hotel October 19 - 24

The Canberra Times Australia

Black Pearls and Strange Fruit ( Prince of Wales Hotel, St.Kilda) October 31st 1999 Reviewer: Helen Musa

Devised and performed by Jackie Gordon, at the Prince of Wales, St. Kilda, October 19 to 24.

Most Billie Holiday fans know the song Strange Fruit, but do they, Jackie Gordon wonders, know what the fruit are.  The fruit that grow on Southern tree are the bodies of lynched black Americans.

Starting from this point, Australian-American performer Gordon launched first into the famous Billie holiday protest against racism and then into a 75 minute narrated presentation about the “black pearls” of American song, the black female singers who changed the face of American music.

Gordon’s spoken voice is light but her singing variously expressive, poignant and joyous.  Backed by a fine jazz combo and changing slide projections showing us the real black pearls, she does not spare us the best – Billie, Bessie, Ella, Dinah, Nina, Eartha, and Lena – with Aretha hovering in the background throughout.

My one objection is to Gordon’s imposition of saintliness on to the lives of these women – convenient to see than as heroic, but they were not uniformly so.  The result is partly educative – who knew, for instance that Go Down Moses was a code song on the plantations?  But the strongest impression was the pleasure at hearing such music in a concentrated program.  I would hope to see Black Pearls and Strange Fruit touring Australia, perhaps even to the stage of the Canberra Theatre.