[Dixielandjazz] Billie Holiday - If Not your OKOM, DELETE NOW

[Stephen Barbone]

The Times also had this reminiscence today. I have this 78, quite
scratchy now,  and it is sensational. Love Pres's "When You're Smiling"
on the flip side too.

July 16, 2002

Billie Holiday Steals His Heart

By DAN MORGENSTERN

IT was her record of "Easy Living" that made me fall in love with Billie
Holiday. This was in the era of 78's, when we absorbed our
take-home music very differently from LP's and CD's, repeated hearings
leading to intimate acquaintance. It was Lester Young's
buoyant, dancing tenor sax that grabbed me on the flip side, "When
You're Smiling." But on "Easy Living," eight haunting tenor
bars notwithstanding, it was Billie: the husky warmth of her sound, the
lilting thrust of her phrasing (oh, that bridge!), the impassioned
identification she brought to Leo Robin's lyrics, making it poetry, and
all aided and abetted by Buck Clayton's muted trumpet
obbligato — two voices melding into one musical stream. That was some 55
years ago, the disc long since worn out, but after many
reincarnations (classic Holiday has seldom been out of catalog) and
hundreds of hearings, the thrill is not gone.

Dan Morgenstern is the director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at
Rutgers.