Billie Holiday - All of Me: Spotlight on Billie Holiday '2021

Tracks list

Tracklist:

01. Them There Eyes
02. All Of Me
03. Solitude
04. Strange Fruit
05. God Bless The Child
06. I Cried For You
07. Aint Nobodys Business If I Do (Single Version)
08. Lady Sings The Blues
09. Lover Man
10. Gimme A Pigfoot And A Bottle Of Beer
11. Travlin Light
12. Good Morning Heartache
13. Stormy Weather
14. April In Paris
15. Crazy He Calls Me
16. Prelude To A Kiss
17. Ill Be Seeing You
18. Nice Work If You Can Get It
19. Blue Moon
20. Body And Soul
21. I Didnt Know What Time It Was
22. Autumn In New York
23. I Cover The Waterfront
24. As Time Goes By
25. Love Me Or Leave Me
26. Moonglow
27. On The Sunny Side Of The Street
28. What A Little Moonlight Can Do
29. What Is This Thing Called Love (Single Version)
30. Too Marvelous For Words
31. Ill Look Around
32. Billies Blues
33. Fine And Mellow
34. Gee Baby, Aint I Good To You
35. Yesterdays
36. Come Rain Or Come Shine
37. Stars Fell On Alabama
38. I Dont Want To Cry Anymore
39. Dont Explain
40. Whats New
41. Easy Living
42. Do Nothin Till You Hear From Me
43. Softly
44. Tenderly
45. How Am I To Know?
46. These Foolish Things (Remind Me Of You)
47. Youre My Thrill
48. If The Moon Turns Green
49. That Ole Devil Called Love
50. Baby Get Lost (Single Version)
51. Big Stuff
52. Im Yours
53. I Wished On The Moon
54. Hes Funny That Way
55. My Old Flame
56. My Man
57. Porgy
58. Dont Worry Bout Me
59. All The Way
60. One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)

 Biography:The first popular jazz singer to move audiences with the intense,
personal feeling of classic blues, Billie Holiday changed the art of American
pop vocals forever. More than a half-century after her death, its difficult to
believe that prior to her emergence, jazz and pop singers were tied to the Tin
Pan Alley tradition and rarely personalized their songs; only blues singers like
Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey actually gave the impression they had lived through
what they were singing. Billie Holidays highly stylized reading of this blues
tradition revolutionized traditional pop, ripping the decades-long tradition of
song plugging in two by refusing to compromise her artistry for either the song
or the band. She made clear her debts to Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong (in
her autobiography she admitted, I always wanted Bessies big sound and Pops
feeling), but in truth her style was virtually her own, quite a shock in an age
of interchangeable crooners and band singers.

With her spirit shining through on every recording, Holidays technical expertise
also excelled in comparison to the great majority of her contemporaries. Often
bored by the tired old Tin Pan Alley songs she was forced to record early in her
career, Holiday fooled around with the beat and the melody, phrasing behind the
beat and often rejuvenating the standard melody with harmonies borrowed from her
favorite horn players, Armstrong and Lester Young. (She often said she tried to
sing like a horn.) Her notorious private life -- a series of abusive
relationships, substance addictions, and periods of depression -- undoubtedly
assisted her legendary status, but Holidays best performances (Lover Man, Dont
Explain, Strange Fruit, her own composition God Bless the Child) remain among
the most sensitive and accomplished vocal performances ever recorded. More than
technical ability, more than purity of voice, what made Billie Holiday one of
the best vocalists of the century -- easily the equal of Ella Fitzgerald or
Frank Sinatra -- was her relentlessly individualist temperament, a quality that
colored every one of her endlessly nuanced performances.

Billie Holidays chaotic life reportedly began in Baltimore on April 7, 1915 (a
few reports say 1912) when she was born Eleanora Fagan Gough. Her father,
Clarence Holiday, was a teenaged jazz guitarist and banjo player later to play
in Fletcher Hendersons Orchestra. He never married her mother, Sadie Fagan, and
left while his daughter was still a baby. (She would later run into him in New
York, and though she contracted many guitarists for her sessions before his
death in 1937, she always avoided using him.) Holidays mother was also a young
teenager at the time, and whether because of inexperience or neglect, often left
her daughter with uncaring relatives. Holiday was sentenced to Catholic reform
school at the age of ten, reportedly after she admitted being raped. Though
sentenced to stay until she became an adult, a family friend helped get her
released after just two years. With her mother, she moved in 1927, first to New
Jersey and soon after to Brooklyn.

In New York, Holiday helped her mother with domestic work, but soon began
moonlighting as a prostitute for the additional income. According to the weighty
Billie Holiday legend (which gained additional credence after her notoriously
apocryphal autobiography Lady Sings the Blues), her big singing break came in
1933 when a laughable dancing audition at a speakeasy prompted her accompanist
to ask her if she could sing. In fact, Holiday was most likely singing at clubs
all over New York City as early as 1930-31. Whatever the true story, she first
gained some publicity in early 1933, when record producer John Hammond -- only
three years older than Holiday herself, and just at the beginning of a legendary
career -- wrote her up in a column for Melody Maker and brought Benny Goodman to
one of her performances. After recording a demo at Columbia Studios, Holiday
joined a small group led by Goodman to make her commercial debut on November 27,
1933 with Your Mothers Son-In-Law.

Though she didnt return to the studio for over a year, Billie Holiday spent 1934
moving up the rungs of the competitive New York bar scene. By early 1935, she
made her debut at the Apollo Theater and appeared in a one-reeler film with Duke
Ellington. During the last half of 1935, Holiday finally entered the studio
again and recorded a total of four sessions. With a pick-up band supervised by
pianist Teddy Wilson, she recorded a series of obscure, forgettable songs
straight from the gutters of Tin Pan Alley -- in other words, the only songs
available to an obscure black band during the mid-30s. (During the swing era,
music publishers kept the best songs strictly in the hands of society orchestras
and popular white singers.) Despite the poor song quality, Holiday and various
groups (including trumpeter Roy Eldridge, alto Johnny Hodges, and tenors Ben
Webster and Chu Berry) energized flat songs like What a Little Moonlight Can Do,
Twenty-Four Hours a Day and If You Were Mine (to say nothing of Eeny Meeny Miney
Mo and Yankee Doodle Never Went to Town). The great combo playing and Holidays
increasingly assured vocals made them quite popular on Columbia, Brunswick and
Vocalion.

During 1936, Holiday toured with groups led by Jimmie Lunceford and Fletcher
Henderson, then returned to New York for several more sessions. In late January
1937, she recorded several numbers with a small group culled from one of
Hammonds new discoveries, Count Basies Orchestra. Tenor Lester Young, whod
briefly known Billie several years earlier, and trumpeter Buck Clayton were to
become especially attached to Holiday. The three did much of their best recorded
work together during the late 30s, and Holiday herself bestowed the nickname
Pres on Young, while he dubbed her Lady Day for her elegance. By the spring of
1937, she began touring with Basie as the female complement to his male singer,
Jimmy Rushing. The association lasted less than a year, however. Though
officially she was fired from the band for being temperamental and unreliable,
shadowy influences higher up in the publishing world reportedly commanded the
action after she refused to begin singing 20s female blues standards.

At least temporarily, the move actually benefited Holiday -- less than a month
after leaving Basie, she was hired by Artie Shaws popular band. She began
singing with the group in 1938, one of the first instances of a black female
appearing with a white group. Despite the continuing support of the entire band,
however, show promoters and radio sponsors soon began objecting to Holiday --
based on her unorthodox singing style almost as much as her race. After a series
of escalating indignities, Holiday quit the band in disgust. Yet again, her
judgment proved valuable; the added freedom allowed her to take a gig at a hip
new club named Café Society, the first popular nightspot with an inter-racial
audience. There, Billie Holiday learned the song that would catapult her career
to a new level: Strange Fruit.

The standard, written by Café Society regular Lewis Allen and forever tied to
Holiday, is an anguished reprisal of the intense racism still persistent in the
South. Though Holiday initially expressed doubts about adding such a bald,
uncompromising song to her repertoire, she pulled it off thanks largely to her
powers of nuance and subtlety. Strange Fruit soon became the highlight of her
performances. Though John Hammond refused to record it (not for its politics but
for its overly pungent imagery), he allowed Holiday a bit of leverage to record
for Commodore, the label owned by jazz record-store owner Milt Gabler. Once
released, Strange Fruit was banned by many radio outlets, though the growing
jukebox industry (and the inclusion of the excellent Fine and Mellow on the
flip) made it a rather large, though controversial, hit. She continued recording
for Columbia labels until 1942, and hit big again with her most famous
composition, 1941s God Bless the Child. Gabler, who also worked A&R for Decca,
signed her to the label in 1944 to record Lover Man, a song written especially
for her and her third big hit. Neatly side-stepping the musicians union ban that
afflicted her former label, Holiday soon became a priority at Decca, earning the
right to top-quality material and lavish string sections for her sessions. She
continued recording scattered sessions for Decca during the rest of the 40s, and
recorded several of her best-loved songs including Bessie Smiths Taint Nobodys
Business If I Do, Them There Eyes, and Crazy He Calls Me.

Though her artistry was at its peak, Billie Holidays emotional life began a
turbulent period during the mid-40s. Already heavily into alcohol and marijuana,
she began smoking opium early in the decade with her first husband, Johnnie
Monroe. The marriage didnt last, but hot on its heels came a second marriage to
trumpeter Joe Guy and a move to heroin. Despite her triumphant concert at New
Yorks Town Hall and a small film role -- as a maid (!) -- with Louis Armstrong
in 1947s New Orleans, she lost a good deal of money running her own orchestra
with Joe Guy. Her mothers death soon after affected her deeply, and in 1947 she
was arrested for possession of heroin and sentenced to eight months in prison.

Unfortunately, Holidays troubles only continued after her release. The drug
charge made it impossible for her to get a cabaret card, so nightclub
performances were out of the question. Plagued by various celebrity hawks from
all portions of the underworld (jazz, drugs, song publishing, etc.), she
soldiered on for Decca until 1950. Two years later, she began recording for jazz
entrepreneur Norman Granz, owner of the excellent labels Clef, Norgran, and by
1956, Verve. The recordings returned her to the small-group intimacy of her
Columbia work, and reunited her with Ben Webster as well as other top-flight
musicians such as Oscar Peterson, Harry Sweets Edison, and Charlie Shavers.
Though the ravages of a hard life were beginning to take their toll on her
voice, many of Holidays mid-50s recordings are just as intense and beautiful as
her classic work.

Lady in SatinDuring 1954, Holiday toured Europe to great acclaim, and her 1956
autobiography brought her even more fame (or notoriety). She made her last great
appearance in 1957, on the CBS television special The Sound of Jazz with
Webster, Lester Young, and Coleman Hawkins providing a close backing. One year
later, the Lady in Satin LP clothed her naked, increasingly hoarse voice with
the overwrought strings of Ray Ellis. During her final year, she made two more
appearances in Europe before collapsing in May 1959 of heart and liver disease.
Still procuring heroin while on her death bed, Holiday was arrested for
possession in her private room and died on July 17, her system completely unable
to fight both withdrawal and heart disease at the same time. Her cult of
influence spread quickly after her death and gave her more fame than shed
enjoyed in life. The 1972 biopic Lady Sings the Blues featured Diana Ross
struggling to overcome the conflicting myths of Holidays life, but the film also
illuminated her tragic life and introduced many future fans. By the digital age,
virtually all of Holidays recorded material had been reissued: by Columbia (nine
volumes of The Quintessential Billie Holiday), Decca (The Complete Decca
Recordings), and Verve (The Complete Billie Holiday on Verve 1945-1959). ~ John
Bush

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