Lady Day: The Master Takes and Singles – Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra, Teddy Wilson & His Orchestra, Benny Carter & Orchestra, Eddie Heywood & Orchestra – Sony Legacy 4-CD Set

One thing we haven’t lacked in recent years is Billie Holiday compilations. There have been many: Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia (1933-1944), The Complete Commodore Recordings (1939-1944), The Complete Decca Recordings (1944-1950) and The Complete Billie Holiday on Verve (1945-1959). Does this 4-disc set offer anything new? Yes and no. It doesn’t offer any new material, but it does organize the material in a new way. Lady Day: The Master Takes and Singles contains eighty songs selected from the 153 on The Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia (1933-1944), a 10-CD set. It also covers a slightly narrower period (1935-1942), and is comprised of singles released on the Brunswick, Vocalion, Columbia, OKeh, and Harmony labels. There are notable omissions of course: songs like “Lover Man” and “Don’t Explain” either came later in her career or were picked up by other companies. In the case of “Strange Fruit,” Commodore Records released it when Columbia shied away because of the lynching theme. So don’t look for it here.

Nevertheless, the eighty songs on this set are great fun to listen to over and over. If you turn up the volume and let them pour over you, they may even get you up on your feet. (They’re dance tunes, all of them.) With all the media attention on Holiday’s self-destructive antics, you sometimes forget what a consummate professional she was, particularly in this pre-drug-addled point in her career. She hired excellent musicians (Teddy Wilson & His Orchestra, Benny Carter & Orchestra, Eddie Heywood & Orchestra, and of course she had her own orchestra). She was unusually generous in granting solo time (one-half the song in many cases) and frequently let her musicians cut loose. Listen to the bizarre trumpet intro in “The Mood I’m In” followed by Red Allen’s loping piano. Likewise “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie” features Teddy Wilson’s extraordinarily expressive piano interlude. Such creativity gushed out when Holiday quickly tired of Tin Pan Alley and other creaky blues standards and took to singing contemporary songs. She does Fred Astaire one better by singing “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” and “Night and Day” in her own smoky intimate style. In many of these songs she not only bent the beat and melody, but rephrased the harmonies. She often said she was so inspired by horn players Louis Armstrong and Lester Young that she tried to sing like a horn.

How do these old cuts sound? Remarkably good, considering that some of them are over seventy years old. A few imperfections appear to have slipped by the engineers: a nasty scratch on “Don’t Know If I’m Comin’ or Goin’” and unusually dense surface noise on “Where Is the Sun?” Yet there are so many great songs in this collection that such imperfections will quickly slide past you. The last CD features highly stylized numbers like “Am I Blue?”, “All of Me” and of course her own variegated “God Bless the Child,” which she claimed was inspired after a money argument with her mother. Her rendition of “Gloomy Sunday,” the Rezs-Seress song which inspired mass suicides, is indeed a creepy piece, forged in the minor key and braided with fatalistic lyrics. In “The Man I Love” you can clearly hear the famous Holiday lilt, and if “Swing Brother Swing” doesn’t send you back to The Cotton Club, nothing will.

 

TrackList =
Disc: 1
1. I Wished on the Moon
2. What a Little Moonlight Can Do
3. Miss Brown to You
4. If You Were Mine
5. These ‘n’ That ‘n’ Those
6. You Let Me Down
7. Spreadin’ Rhythm Around
8. Life Begins When You’re in Love
9. It’s Like Reaching for the Moon
10. These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You)
11. I Cried for You
12. Did I Remember?
13. No Regrets
14. Summertime
15. Billie’s Blues
16. Fine Romance
17. One, Two, Button Your Shoe
18. Easy to Love
19. Way You Look Tonight
20. Pennies from Heaven

Disc: 2
1. That’s Life I Guess
2. I Can’t Give You Anything But Love
3. I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm
4. He Ain’t Got Rhythm
5. This Year’s Kisses
6. Why Was I Born?
7. I Must Have That Man
8. Mood That I’m In
9. You Showed Me the Way
10. My Last Affair
11. Moanin’ Low
12. Where Is the Sun?
13. Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off
14. They Can’t Take That Away from Me
15. Don’t Know If I’m Comin’ or Goin’
16. I’ll Get By (As Long as I Have You)
17. Mean to Me
18. Foolin’ Myself
19. Easy Living
20. I’ll Never Be the Same

Disc: 3
1. Me, Myself and I
2. Sailboat in the Moonlight
3. Without Your Love
4. Trav’lin’ All Alone
5. He’s Funny That Way
6. Nice Work If You Can Get It
7. Things Are Looking Up
8. My Man
9. Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man
10. When You’re Smiling (The Whole World Smiles with You)
11. On the Sentimental Side
12. When a Woman Loves a Man
13. You Go to My Head
14. I’m Gonna Lock My Heart (And Throw Away the Key)
15. Very Thought of You
16. I Can’t Get Started
17. More Than You Know
18. Sugar
19. Long Gone Blues
20. Some Other Spring

Disc: 4
1. Them There Eyes
2. Swing! Brother, Swing!
3. Night and Day
4. Man I Love
5. Body and Soul
6. Falling in Love Again
7. Laughing at Life
8. Time on My Hands (You in My Arms)
9. St. Louis Blues
10. Loveless Love
11. Let’s Do It
12. Georgia on My Mind
13. All of Me
14. God Bless the Child
15. Am I Blue?
16. I Cover the Waterfront
17. Love Me or Leave Me
18. Gloomy Sunday
19. It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie
20. Until the Real Thing Comes Along

— Peter Bates