Andra Day is rising up with her first album in nine years — and taking the stage in Central Park for a free show

nypost.com:

Andra Day was rising all the way up as a Grammy-nominated chanteuse — for her 2015 debut album, “Cheers to the Fall” — who sang like the spiritual goddaughter of Billie Holiday and Erykah Badu.Then in 2021, the 39-year-old singer — born Cassandra Monique Batie — flipped the script to become the Golden Globe-winning, Oscar-nominated star of “The United States vs.

Billie Holiday,” the Lee Daniels-directed biopic about the same Lady Day who inspired her stage name.Now, nine years and three movies later — she also shot the indie drama “Exhibiting Forgiveness” and the upcoming supernatural thriller “The Deliverance” — Day is back to bringing her own jazzy, sultry vibes with her long-awaited second studio album, “Cassandra (cherith).”And she will continue to get her own gardenia groove back in the most pastoral of New York settings — Central Park — when she headlines the season kickoff of the SummerStage series with a free concert on Saturday.Still, she hasn’t completely kicked the Holiday habit.“There are some parts for sure that I could still shake and then some parts I’m realizing, well, I’m just growing, you know what I mean?” Day told The Post. “Like, there’s just things in life that change you.

If you get married, it changes you. When you graduate college, it changes you. You get a great job, a change.“So there are certain things that I had to just accept, like, why am I trying to go back to who I was,” she continued. “So there’s parts of her that I’m like, ‘Yeah, well, this is just a part of the new me.’ ”But even before “The United Staes vs.

Billie Holiday,” Day was nourished as an artist by the “Strange Fruit” of her ancestor.“I think particularly [by] her ownership of her voice,” she said.