Haley's Vocal Range

[lovinghaleyr]

NYT:

Probably no voice in the history of jazz exerts a deeper fascination than the vulnerable, intimate slur of Billie Holiday, who died in 1959 at the age of 44. With a vocal range of barely an octave and the timbre of a muted horn, Miss Holiday's singing was far from athletic, but it spanned the emotional range of the universe, communicating joy and pain with an immediacy that seemed at once artless and profoundly sophisticated.

"Vocal Jazz" from Wikipedia:

The entrance of Billie Holiday into the world of jazz singing in the early 1930s was a revelation. She approached the voice from a radical angle, explaining, in her own words,

I don't feel like I'm singing, I feel like I'm playing the horn.

Compared to other great jazz singers, Holiday had a rather limited vocal range of just over an octave. Where Holiday's genius lay, however, was to compensate for this shortcoming, with impeccable timing, nuanced phrasing, and emotional immediacy...

A voice-training blog

It is alleged that Billie Holiday’s vocal range just about exceeded one octave. One octave! In this day and age of mammoth singers...a potential singer with just over one octave would probably have reason to think that they have little hope or future… yet, Billie only ever worked within one octave, as did Bessie Smith, one of the ‘first ladies of Blues’. They show us that bigger definitely isn’t better, or that BIG, indeed, is only and truly measurable in ounces of heart, litres of sweat, and yards of soul and tears, rather than the distance between this note and that one on the keyboard… And that a ‘great singer’ is measured by how much they have to say, not on how loud or over how many notes they say it.

http://voiceoutvocaltraining.com/2011/12...nt-better/

Good point Miguel,that's what I said,don't matter how range you have,
the important is how you use them and Haley know a lot about this.