Billie Holiday - Lady Day: The Best of Billie Holiday
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CD Details
Artist: Billie HolidayEdition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 2001-10-02
Music Label: Sony / Columbia Legacy
Soundtracks:
Music CD 1
- What A Little Moonlight Can Do - Billie Holiday
- These Foolish Things - Billie Holiday
- I Cried For You - Billie Holiday
- Summertime - Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra
- Billie's Blues - Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra
- If You Were Mine - Billie Holiday
- A Fine Romance - Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra
- Easy To Love - Billie Holiday
- I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm - Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra
- I Must Have That Man - Billie Holiday
- Me, Myself And I - Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra
- They Can't Take Away From Me - Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra
- Easy Living - Billie Holiday
- A Sailboat In The Moonlight - Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra
- Travelin' All Alone - Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra
- When A Woman Loves A Man - Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra
- You Go To My Head - Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra
- My Man - Billie Holiday
- I Can't Believe That You're In Love With Me - Billie Holiday
- The Very Thought Of You - Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra
- I Can't Get Started - Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra
- Long Gone Blues - Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra
- Sugar - Billie Holiday
- Some Other Spring - Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra
- Them There Eyes - Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra
- The Man I Love - Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra
- Body And Soul - Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra
- Swing, Brothers, Swing - Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra
- Night And Day - Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra
- Let's Do It - Billie Holiday
- God Bless The Child - Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra
- Solitude - Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra
- I Cover The Waterfront - Billie Holiday
- Gloomy Sunday - Billie Holiday
- Until The Real Thing Comes Along - Billie Holiday
- All Of Me - Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra
Music reviews of Lady Day: The Best of Billie Holiday
Music Review: A serious and great artist's best work, you need these sides
Rating: 5 Stars
If there were some way to award music 200 stars, I am sure all of us would have done so for this set!
Like others here, I have it all, but I think her work from the 30s and early 1940s from Columbia and its ancestors is not just her greatest works, but among the great works of world musical culture. Everyone with a set of ears should be more or less required to have this music and enjoy it.
Strange Fruit was not recorded for Columbia but for the Indy label Commodore. Thus, you will not find it on this or any of the Columbia collections like this that capture her work in the period BEFORE Strange Fruit. It was recorded in the 1940s, whereas this collection contains work from Billie in the 1930s and perhaps 1940 and 1941. No doubt Sony wishes it had the rights to that side and everything else Commodore recorded, but they don't.
The truth is, Strange Fruit is not one of Billie's Greatest works. There are about 15 tunes on this CD that have better singing, better musicians backing her, and were more important pieces of Billie's work. Strange Fruit is well known to the people who know about Billie as a person, but don't know much about Billie as a Jazz musician. Her recording, while powerful, was not very nuanced, not very jazzy, and not as good as much of the work here. Indeed, the weakness of her mid-1940s Commodore work as opposed to these recordings is that Billie was persuaded to move away from Jazz and swing to attempt to become a cabarat chanteuse of "serious" songs, a move that some also relate to the inception of heroin and the decline of her voice, a move that brought about a decline in her art.
If you want to hear a better version of "Strange Fruit," listen to Josh White's recording which is so much more powerful, if not as well known. I am not downing the song or its politics, far from it, but Billie's Strange Fruit is more important as a political statement than as a work of Jazz art.
One of the greatest things about these records are the many master musicians of swing and jazz that join her on these recordings. Very shortly after she started recording, the greatest names in Jazz would flock to her sessions and play on her recordings for litte because of the innovation and creativity Billie showed as a jazz creator in her own right. These recordings were a chance for them to jam together in loose arrangements and be more innovative and creative than they were with the orchestras they played with.
These masters of Jazz viewed Billie as a serious artist of Jazz. They delighted in her knowledge of the musical aspects of swing jazz which was unique for such a young singer (she was in her twenties when these records were made) and delighted in her ability to sense what they were doing in their accompaniments and solos and to respond to them in her vocals.
Despite the exaggerated picture of her life as a prostitute that was part of the marketing of the 1950's work of ghost-written fiction called "Lady Sings the Blues," that a drug addled Billie claimed was her autobiography, Billie Holiday grew up around Jazz with her father being a big band guitar player who complained Billie hired every NY guitarist but him for these sessions. Billie's mother specialized in boarding Jazz musicians and catering parties for musicians and singers, parties where the young Billie would often help serve the food. So when she met Lester young in 1937 for these sessions, she had already known the man she named 'Prez in 1934 when he boarded with her mother while he was in the Fletcher Henderson band.
These sides contain most of the great collaboration between Lester Young and Billie. They were great musical friends and personal friends until Billie became a heroin addict, at which point Lester didn't much want to be around her.
However, as much as I am a Lester Young man to the death (his framed picture hangs in my home), too little is said of the other musicians who grace these recordings. Billie's collaboration with pianist Teddy Wilson who plays on and directed most of these recordings (many were recorded as Teddy Wilson Orchestra sides)needs to be explored. Likewise, her work with the great bassists and rhythm players on these records needs to be appreciated. My favorite sides are the ones in which she has the benefit of Basieites like her dear friend Freddy Green on guitar and the great Walter Page on bass. Likewise, Billie's musical closeness with the great Buck Clayton and his role on these sides is also underestimated.
Yet, it doesn't matter if Billie had recorded these sides with some high school band members from Winslow, Arizona. This is good music to listen to, good music to smile to, music to fall in love to, and music to dance too. Contrary to the tendency to get maudlin and milk her image as a tragedy that Holiday developed in the 1950s as her life and her musical skill declined , even the songs on these recordings with the sadest lyrics possess a great joy, swing, and spirit of the wonders of Jazz.
Description of Lady Day: The Best of Billie Holiday
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