Directed by James Erskine, Billie is a new documentary based on the unpublished Billie Holiday researches in the 1970s of journalist Linda Lipnack Kuehl who over eight years tape recorded hundreds of hours of interviews with Billie's colleagues and acquaintances including Charles Mingus, Tony Bennett, Count Basie, family, friends and even the FBI agents who arrested her.

A raw, candid, sometimes poignant film, Kuehl herself tragically died in not fully explainable circumstances, her book left unpublished. But these interviews survive her and they are very impressive as journalism. Billie Holiday's extraordinary contribution to jazz is illuminated in new detail enhanced by period images some quite familiar, some nicely enhanced, and audio sources not so well known along with well chosen musical examples.

Holiday is never portrayed as a victim because Kuehl wants to tell her story warts and all not judging but not sanitising by omission either. Even if you know the story of her life through numerous books and stories out there some of which just concentrate on the salacious, the deep shock of the racism of the times, the predatory world in which Billie Holiday grew up in, still takes the breath away. And that voice, still the greatest female jazz voice of all, does so too but for very different, life changing, reasons.

• Billie is available from 13 November on Barbican Cinema on Demand. A live Q&A with James Erskine features on 15 November as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival. The documentary then screens on Amazon and iTunes from 16 November. Billie: The Original Soundtrack out on Verve on 13 November collects some of Holiday’s best known songs including 'God Bless The Child' and 'Strange Fruit' that are featured in the film.

Billie Holiday at the Strand Theatre, New York, in 1953, top. Press photo.