Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [88]
If you’re prepared to spend some money, you have a choice of several rewarding box sets. The first, Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia, 1933–1944, is an extravagantly beautiful package of ten CDs covering the glorious beginnings of Billie’s career—her early recordings produced by John Hammond and featuring Benny Goodman, Teddy Wilson, and Lester Young, plus her fabulous stint with the Count Basie Band. Legacy has recently issued a judiciously slimmed-down and well-annotated four-disc version of this material: Lady Day: The Master Takes and Singles.
If you’d rather sample this nascent period in a single disc, Legacy offers the individually packaged Quintessential Billie Holiday, volumes 1 through 9. I especially love volume 2, with her incomparable versions of “No Regrets,” “A Fine Romance,” and “Easy to Love.”
Because Columbia refused to record the controversial “Strange Fruit,” Billie took the song to Milt Gabler, who put it out on his small Commodore label in 1939. Ironically, “Strange Fruit” became Holiday’s first hit and most famous record. The Gabler sessions are preserved in a two-CD set, Billie Holiday: The Complete Commodore Sessions, an essential component in her enduring repertoire. A single disc of this same material is also available as Billie Holiday: The Commodore Master Tapes.
Gabler became Billie’s producer at Decca Records, where Holiday recorded from 1944 to 1950. Here she achieved mastery and recorded immortal gems like “Lover Man,” “Don’t Explain,” and “Baby Get Lost.” They’re all on the two-CD set Billie Holiday: The Complete Decca Recordings. Included are her two radiant duets with Louis Armstrong, “You Can’t Lose a Broken Heart” and “My Sweet Hunk o’ Trash.” The single-disc compilation of her Decca material—Billie Holiday’s Greatest Hits—omits the Armstrong numbers.
Producer/impresario/label owner Norman Granz dominated the final decade of Billie’s recording career, the fifties. Granz viewed her Decca material as over-commercial and over-orchestrated. He saw her as a pure singer and put her in the studio, primarily in Los Angeles, where she recorded with instrumentalists—Oscar Peterson, Ben Webster, Benny Carter, Sweets Edison, Ray Brown, Barney Kessel—whose genius complemented her with quiet fire. The arrangements are sparse, the sessions are loose, and, for the most part, Billie is exquisitely relaxed.
The best example of this period on a single disc may be Music for Torching, with a remarkably understated “I Don’t Want to Cry Any More” and an ethereal reading of “Gone with the Wind.” Lady Sings the Blues, another single CD from this era, originally issued in 1956 to complement her memoir, contains her self-penned title song and is still available. I’m also partial to the songs selected for the two-CD Lady in Autumn: The Best of the Verve Years.
Two hefty box sets documenting her work for Granz are expensive but worth it. The definitive ten-CD set The Complete Billie Holiday on Verve is magnificent. It includes her performances at the famed Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts with, among others, Coleman Hawkins, Buck Clayton, and Illinois Jacquet. There are a number of recordings that feature her live everywhere from Carnegie Hall to Cologne, Germany. The rehearsal tapes, especially the one with Billie singing “A Yiddishe Momme,” are fascinating. Included is her final album, Last Recording, cut after Lady in Satin but arranged and supervised by the same maestro, Ray Ellis. Less successful than Satin, Last Recording is nonetheless memorable for her heartbreaking reading of “It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” Armstrong’s poignantly ironic anthem. Billie turns it into her own prayer for serenity. “Don