[Dixielandjazz] For Billie Holiday Fans

[Steve Barbone]

Billie Holiday fans/record collectors might want to add this new 5 CD set to
their collection. I still have a copy of the bootleg record talked about in
the first paragraph. One of a very few records/albums/Cds that I kept rather
than passed along to others. Why? Because like Ben Ratliff says, it is one
of the best recordings in jazz.

IMO this set, compared to her studio performances, illustrates the creative
difference between live and studio. Holiday's 30s and 40s live recordings
are some of the best jazz vocal around.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


BILLIE HOLIDAY

³Rare Live Recordings" - 1934-1959² (ESP-Disk)

Here¹s Billie Holiday singing ³I Cried for You² at Monroe¹s Uptown House, a
Harlem club, in 1941. It¹s not much like the controlled performance on her
studio recording of the song five years earlier. Here she is hollering with
effective hesitation between words. ³I, cried, f¹you,² she sings, ³now, it¹s
your, turn, to cry, o-ver me.² From the audience a woman screams back at
her. The rhythm section sounds faint and smudgy. The track comes from an old
bootleg, made by a portable recorder in the club. It is still one of the
best recordings in jazz.

Even under the layers of her public persona and singing style, which
thickened in the ¹50s, Holiday was a completely radical singer. Rhythmically
she was vicious. In a pinched honk she could sing long chunks of a song
within a small pitch range, moving all the emphasis toward her magic tricks
with time. 

Her well-known studio records are great of course. But without hearing her
live you might understand her only partially, especially since 50 years of
fishy-looking releases from fly-by-night labels of live Holiday performances
have made it hard for the average person to expect that these recordings
could be any good. 

On the surface this new five-disc collection doesn¹t exactly right the
situation. This box¹s presentation ‹ particularly the organization of the
liner notes and their sense of chronology ‹ is a dog¹s breakfast. The set
raises a lot of questions, yet it¹s also half-stupendous for the recordings
it brings together in one place.

Just about everything here has been available for a long time, if sometimes
in dubious packages. (About a quarter of the boxed set derives from a New
York jazz enthusiast named Boris Rose, who recorded live broadcast
performances over the radio at home and sold his acetate discs by
mail-order.) Some of these tracks ‹ radio transcriptions or rehearsal tapes
‹ have surfaced as curiosities on reputable CD reissues by Sony or Verve.

Blindfold yourself and listen. In the ¹30s and ¹40s Holiday is great beyond
belief. In some of the ¹50s tracks she becomes increasingly slurry or tired,
and you hear her using art to fight through it (although a concert
performance in Boston three months before her death in 1959 is amazingly
lucid).

The virtue of the set is all the changing period context, everything
surrounding her: ¹40s stage announcers, studio orchestras and pickup bands,
even the bad dialogue from her bit part in the film ³New Orleans.² It¹s
confusing, yet it all helps you understand Holiday¹s passage from a
hard-core swing singer into a pop idol. BEN RATLIFF - NY TIMES.