The Ultimate Collection

Holliday, Billie

album cover

There's Billie Holiday, and There's Everyone Else

Billie Holiday (1915–1959) started out singing with big bands in the 1930s, and for those gigs, her vocabulary was the shooby-doodling happy talk of swing, then the coin of the realm. Over the next two decades, through struggles with heroin addiction and other personal ordeals, Holiday developed an idiosyncratic performance style that separated her from every other singer on the planet. This firstever career retrospective compresses that evolution into two discs, and includes spry early singles, dramatic ballads, and excerpts from her last studio set, Lady in Satin, which she croaksings in a wobbly, poignantly devastated voice.

Holiday slowed jazz singing down to a crawl, and with help from the pianist Teddy Wilson and others, brought it to a place of great intimacy. She shaped familiar melodies into a language of alluringly fractured half-sentences and mewling, vaguely discontented sighs. And she dared to bring her own life experience into her interpretations, infusing a generic lyric like "Good Morning Heartache" with a palpable appreciation for all manner of love trouble. In her hazy world, heartbreak is a given, poise is constantly being tested, and every phrase reveals new cracks in an already precarious emotional state.

As her profile grew, the Baltimore-born singer ventured beyond the torch song. With a forthrightness that was radical for the time, Holiday brought her listeners face-to-face with the legacies of racial hatred ("Strange Fruit," 1939) and poverty ("God Bless the Child," 1941). In a sense, the protest music of the 1960s has roots in her work.

This two-CD, one-DVD set amounts to the best "first encounter" with Billie Holiday. It includes definitive versions of "You Go to My Head," "Willow Weep for Me," and "I Thought About you," among others, performances that show her singing in a way that effortlessly coaxed greatness from her surrounding musicians. Holiday was the type of singer who kept musicians on their toes; check out the version of "Fine and Mellow," taped for Robert Herridge's Seven Lively Arts TV show in 1957, to see her casting a spell over saxophonists Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins. Both the audio and video spotlight the delicate balances that define Holiday's art. She's barely there and at the same time all the way there, singing with the heavy eyelids of last call and a hyperalert awareness of pain, conjuring a soul's anguish that cannot be adequately captured in words.

Genre: Vocals
Released: 2006, Verve
Key Tracks: "Fine and Mellow," "Don't Explain," "Good Morning Heartache," "God Bless the Child," "Strange Fruit," "You Go to My Head."
Catalog Choice: Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia, 1933–1944; Songs for Distingué Lovers
Next Stop: There is none.
Book Pages: 362–363

Buy this Recording

Share this page: