Billie Holiday - Billie Holiday Essentials : The Greatest Songs of the Jazz Diva '2024

Tracks list

Tracklist:

1. I'll Be Seeing You (03:29)
2. Strange Fruit (03:12)
3. Solitude (03:08)
4. All of Me (02:59)
5. How Deep Is the Ocean (02:57)
6. Easy Livin' (03:10)
7. April in Paris (03:01)
8. Isn't This a Lovely Day? (04:11)
9. Crazy He Calls Me (03:02)
10. Blue Moon (03:27)
11. As Time Goes by (03:10)
12. Autumn in New York (03:40)
13. Lady Sings the Blues (03:43)
14. Good Morning Heartache (03:28)
15. Love Me or Leave Me (03:17)
16. Willow Weep for Me (03:05)
17. I'm a Fool to Want You (03:22)
18. My Man (02:55)
19. What a Little Moonlight Can Do (02:56)
20. I Cried for You (02:26)
21. Yesterdays (02:47)
22. God Bless the Child (03:08)
23. Comes Love (03:58)
24. Gloomy Sunday (03:09)
25. Tell Me More (03:06)
26. Time on My Hands (03:02)
27. I Hear Music (02:39)
28. Let's Do It (02:54)
29. The Blues Are Brewin' (03:00)
30. Swing Brother Swing (02:54)
31. I Got the Right to Sing the Blues (02:45)
32. Now or Never (03:14)
33. That Old Devil Called Love (02:52)
34. Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone (04:22)
35. Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me (04:12)
36. I Didn't Know What Time It Was (05:58)
37. Them There Eyes (02:48)
38. He's Funny That Way (03:07)
39. I Hadn't Anyone Till You (04:01)
40. Stars Fell on Alabama (04:26)
41. Trav'lin' Light (03:07)
42. Day in, Day out (06:46)
43. Everything I Have Is Yours (03:44)
44. Moonlight in Vermont (03:46)
45. I'll Never Fail You (with Teddy Wilson & His Orchestra) (02:57)
46. Cheek to Cheek (03:33)
47. I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm (02:54)
48. Say It Isn't So (03:15)
49. Don't Explain (03:20)
50. Billie's Blues (03:07)
51. Fine and Mellow (03:16)
52. Some Other Spring (03:35)
53. I Don't Stand a Ghost of a Chance With You (04:25)
54. Stormy Weather (03:41)
55. Ill Wind (06:13)
56. One for My Baby (And One More for the Road) (05:36)
57. If the Moon Turns Green (02:44)
58. Lover Come Back to Me (03:18)
59. What's New (04:15)
60. These Foolish Things (03:33)
61. It Had to Be You (04:00)
62. I Cover the Waterfront (03:29)
63. But Not for Me (03:47)
64. Embraceable You (03:14)
65. Let's Call the Whole Thing Off (03:21)
66. Love Is Here to Stay (03:40)
67. Nice Work If You Can Get It (03:48)
68. No Good Man (03:05)
69. We'll Be Together Again (04:23)
70. I Must Have That Man! (with Teddy Wilson & His Orchestra) (02:54)
71. My Sweet Hunk of Trash (03:18)
72. Sophisticated Lady (04:47)
73. Body and Soul (06:18)
74. Everything Happens to Me (06:20)
75. Moonglow (02:58)
76. Lover Man (03:20)
77. You Go to My Head (02:51)
78. Easy to Love (02:59)
79. Just One of Those Things (05:28)
80. I Get a Kick Out of You (05:39)
81. Baby Won't You Please Come Home (03:02)
82. No More (02:46)
83. Love for Sale (02:55)
84. Night & Day (02:59)
85. East of the Sun (West of the Moon) (02:54)
86. Gee, Baby, Ain't I Good to You (05:34)
87. All or Nothing at All (05:38)
88. Gone With the Wind (03:23)
89. I Only Have Eyes for You (02:51)
90. Come Rain or Come Shine (04:21)
91. I Thought About You (02:45)
92. When Your Lover Has Gone (04:55)
93. The Man I Love (03:01)
94. I'll Never Be the Same (with Teddy Wilson & His Orchestra) (03:01)
95. Travelin' All Alone (02:12)
96. Back in Your Own Backyard (02:40)
97. They Can't Take That Away From Me (03:01)
98. Tenderly (03:22)
99. Speak Low (04:25)
100. I Don't Want to Cry Anymore (03:53)


 moreWith her spirit shining through on every recording, Holiday's 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 Holiday's best performances
("Lover Man," "Don't 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 Holiday's 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 Henderson's 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.) Holiday's 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 Mother's Son-In-Law."

Though she didn't 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 Holiday's 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
Hammond's new discoveries, Count Basie's Orchestra. Tenor Lester Young, who'd
briefly known Holiday 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 Shaw's 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, 1941's "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 musician's
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
Smith's "'Tain't Nobody's Business If I Do," "Them There Eyes," and "Crazy He
Calls Me."

Though her artistry was at its peak, Billie Holiday's 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 didn't 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 York's Town Hall and a small film role -- as a maid (!) -- with
Louis Armstrong in 1947's New Orleans, she lost a good deal of money running her
own orchestra with Joe Guy. Her mother's death soon after affected her deeply,
and in 1947 she was arrested for possession of heroin and sentenced to eight
months in prison.

Unfortunately, Holiday's 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 Holiday's mid-'50s recordings are just as intense and beautiful
as her classic work.

During 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 she'd enjoyed in life. The
1972 biopic Lady Sings the Blues featured Diana Ross struggling to overcome the
conflicting myths of Holiday's life, but the film also illuminated her tragic
life and introduced many future fans. By the digital age, virtually all of
Holiday's recorded material had been reissued: Columbia released nine volumes of
The Quintessential Billie Holiday; Decca released The Complete Decca Recordings,
and Verve appeared with The Complete Billie Holiday on Verve 1945-1959. ~ John
Bush



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