Friday Night Jazz: Billie Holiday
By now, you should have some feel for my taste in music, and the wide ranging and eclectic flavors that live on my iPod. But unless you are a fool or a wizened old pro, any attempt at doing a Friday Night Jazz on Billie Holiday is likely to fall flat on its face.
Lucky for us, Nat Hentoff -- formerly the Music critic of the Village Voice, and now the Jazz columnist of the WSJ is just such an old pro. In this week's WSJ, he looked at a few new reissues of Lady Day's music:
"Billie must have come from another world," said Roy Eldridge, often heard accompanying her on trumpet, "because nobody had the effect on people she had. I've seen her make them cry and make them happy." Lady Day, as tenor saxophonist Lester Young named Billie Holiday, still has that effect through the many reissues of her recordings, including the recently released "Lady Day: The Master Takes and Singles" of the 1933-44 sessions (Columbia/Legacy, available on Amazon) that established her in the jazz pantheon.
I grew up listening to those sides, which infectiously demonstrated -- as pianist Bobby Tucker, her longtime pianist, noted -- that "she could swing the hardest in any tempo, even if it was like a dirge . . . wherever it was, she could float on top of it." But none of the previous reissues, as imperishable as they are, have as intense a presence of Lady as in the truly historic new five-disc set "Billie Holiday: Rare Live Recordings, 1934-1959" on Bernard Stollman's ESP-Disk label.
This is a model for future retrospectives of classic jazz artists of any era because researcher and compiler Michael Anderson, in his extensive liner notes, provides a timeline of her jazz life -- describing the circumstances of each performance in the context of her evolving career. One example: a live radio remote from Harlem's Savoy Ballroom in 1937 when the 22-year-old singer "began a special association with her comrade, 'The Prez,' Lester Young" -- grooving with the Count Basie band in "Swing Brother Swing."
How could I possibly hope to improve on that?
~~~
For those of you who may be unfamiliar with Lady Day, a great place is NPR Billie Holiday: 'Lady Sings the Blues' special. There's a 54 minute radio broadcast discussing her history and music.
As far as albums go, there are lots of choices, but they pretty much come down to a) Boxed Sets; 2) Early work; 3) Later years.
If you want to start with something basic, go for A Musical Romance - agreat duet with Holiday and her long time friend and msucial collaborator, Lester Young. You can also go to the 2 disc All or Nothing at All. The 2 CD Complete Decca Recordings is also quite good.
For the more ambitious, the boxed sets are the way to go:
• Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia (1933-1944)
• The Complete Billie Holiday On Verve, 1945-1959
The set Hentoff refers to above is the 5 disc set Rare Live Recordings, 1934-1959
Students of her latter work will be interested in:
~~~
Videos after the jump . . .
Videos:
Fine and Mellow
Summertime
Lady Sings the Blues
Lover Man
Strange Fruit
Fine and Mellow
The Blues Are Brewin'
Sources:
Billie Holiday, Live: A Biography in Music
NAT HENTOFF
WSJ, February 12, 2008; Page D7
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120277746663060781.html
• Timeline
• Official Billie Holiday Website
Friday, February 15, 2008 | 07:00 PM | Permalink
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there's really only one thing that our host missed: hentoff makes reference in his writeup to the 1957 "sound of jazz" television show that he co-produced (and the wonderful version of "fine and mellow" and possibly the most elegant blues chorus ever by lester young). for those who have never seen it, it's a wonderful introduction to jazz in general, with many fantastic performances and excellent camera work:
http://www.amazon.com/Sound-Jazz-Complete-Various-Artists/dp/B00011FY1S/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1203121225&sr=1-1
Posted by: howard | Feb 15, 2008 7:23:29 PM
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