Billie Holiday - Lady in Satin
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CD Details
Artist: Billie HolidayEdition: Music CD
Format: Original recording reissued, Original recording remastered
CD Release Date: 1997-09-23
Music Label: Sony
Product features:
- HOLIDAY BILLIE LADY IN SATIN
- I'm A Fool To Want You
- For Heaven's Sake
- You Don't Know What Love Is
- I Get Along Without You Very Well
- For All We Know
- Violets For Your Furs
- You've Changed
- It's Easy To Remember
- But Beautiful
- Glad To Be Unhappy
- I'll Be Around
- The End Of A Love Affair
- I'm A Fool To Want You (Take 3)
- I'm A Fool to Want You (Take 2 - Alternate Take)
- The End Of A Love Affair: The Audio Story
- The End Of A Love Affair (Stereo)
- Pause Track
Music reviews of Lady in Satin
Music Review: Pop direction of Satin is a weakness not strength!
Rating: 3 Stars
Lady in Satin is a nice album, and certainly if you are full scale Billie Holiday fan, it is an album you will have and enjoy and play. No one who really looks at Billie's work as that of a Jazz artist developing and continuing a work begun in her youth can go along with all the hype that says this is one of her best albums, because it isn't.
She may have said it was her favorite album during the last year of her life to sell it just as she said "Lady Sings the Blues" told the story of her life when it absolutely did not. Both were earning her money, but neither assertion is true. But people who will believe this kind of hype probably believe the title Lady Sings the Blues indicates Billie was a Blues singer. They talk about her knowledge of "the blues" when as much as Billie admired the big tone of Bessie Smith, Billie never liked to be called a blues singer. She was a jazz singer. She only recorded a few blues, and then only because there was session time to fill. She was, in fact, forced out of her position in the Basie band, in part because of her lack of a blues repertoire. She was replaced by Helen Humes. Humes had been recording blues for years before Billie recorded anything and continued on as an jump and R & B singer cutting blues for a couple decades after she left Basie.
The accollades for the album are more of a way of continuing the sad approach of looking at Billie not as an artist whose work reflects her own development and that of the broader culture, but of looking at her as a personal crisis for examination and pity. Some speak of her voice having "matured" here, but the truth is a life of abusing her voice by heroin addiction, cigarrette smoking, and near alcholism had destroyed a once strong and beautiful voice, a voice that top jazz instrumentalists saw on a par with their own saxes, trumpets, pianos, or trombnes in creating beautiful jazz riffs and lines. There is nothing on this album that can compare with the vibrancy and musical creation on her 1930s Columbia sides, which is what you should get if you are interested in her best work and not hyping her tragedy!
The album reflected the drift away from recording her as a Jazz artist that happened at the end of her life. This wasn't just a function of developments in Billie's life and singing, but reflected the commercial record industry's attempt to take a number of jazz artists in a pop direct as jazz and every other kind of record sales plummeted once rock and roll began to dominate the charts. So many of these songs and arrangements are better suited for a singer like Julie Christie, than for the jazz Billie Holiday.
The attempt here is to put her over as a chanteuse of torch songs, of emotional songs which can be hyped to represent her personal crsis. The attempt is also to take her out of Jazz and to market her to the pop market. The use of Ellis who is more suited to back an artist like Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin than a Jazz artist like Holiday, indeed the use of the big 1950s studio orchestra with strings, is really part of a pop approach.
Despite the decline in her voice and her health, Holiday always retained her feel for Jazz rhythm and swing.
Even in her youth, it was never the power or strength of her voice, but her total swing sensibility that was as good as that of the top swing musicians like Lester Young, Bennie Goodman, Ben Webster, Freddie Green, Buck Clayton, Johnnie Hodges, Teddy Wilson, and the rest of the long line of musicians who flocked to be on her Columbia recordings because of what she offered as a jazz creator.
Almost none of that is here on this recording. The problem is not really so much Billie's health or addiction, although I am sure that didn't help anything, but the effort to take her pop and to market her personal problems by making her a tragic singer of tragic songs. No doubt, this has also made the album popular with people who don't appreciate or like Jazz, but are part of the pop mainstream.
Lady in Satin has an eiree and dark side to it. There is sometimes a brutal contrast between Billie's attempt to use the nuances of swing jazz against the stiff pop with strings arrangements. Her voice may not be great, and the legend is that this album was a great struggle to create, but her feel for the rhythm and meaning is never weak, never average, always superb.
This is still an album I own and have owned first on vinyl, then on tape, and now on CD. It is one I do listen to, but maybe just once a year, whereas I need some of the real Billie every day. If you are just starting out to try to learn Billie, try any of the great Columbia recordings from the 1930s, or her Verve tracks from the late 1940s and 1950s to hear some of the real Billie Holiday the jazz singer.
Description of Lady in Satin
Limited 'Millennium Edition' reissue of classic 1958 album in a deluxe heavyweight miniaturized LP sleeve complete with inner sleeve and a Japanese-style obi strip on the spine. 12 tracks. Individually numbered. 1999 release.A harrowing classic, Billie Holiday's personal favorite among her '50s albums captures the singer 17 months before her death, her once honeyed voice, scarred and weakened from punishing life, its ravages highlighted by the 1958 session's crisp sonics and the contrasting "satin" of Ray Ellis' sleek string arrangements. Yet it is that very contrast that explains the power of these performances: In revisiting its torchy standards, Holiday reduces them to their core of pain and longing, transforming "I'm a Fool to Want You," "You Don't Know What Love Is," and "You've Changed" into naked declarations as mesmerizing and unsettling as a horrific accident. Any postrocker that presumes pop standards and string sections automatically translate to "easy listening" hasn't listened to this. This 1997 version adds unreleased takes and a beautiful 20-bit digital transfer to extract every shivering pang of Holiday's music. --Sam Sutherland
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