 Billie Holiday Although buying the purple-bordered Columbia Jazz Masterpieces is sort of like accelerating toward a stale green light, I can still justify recommending the Quintessential Billie Holiday series, mainly because there's no telling if or when Legacy will get around to remastering these recordings, and also because they are so uniformly good that it's silly to wait. What would be damn nice would be a complete box set of all the Billie Holiday Columbia recordings, remastered and with beautiful packaging. I know, I'm a bit obsessed with wanting record companies to rerelease everything that came out on CD before like 1996, but they make the new ones look so purty, how can I help it? Oops, wait, there is such a box. But it's so expensive! Hm, I just can't be pleased, can I? People seeking a good first Billie Holiday CD are directed toward The Quintessential Vol. 8, which features eighteen of Holiday's greatest performances, recorded at her absolute peak – there was something very magical about the confluence of great songs, good bands, and Billie's gorgeous, expressive voice that resulted in these great recordings from 1939 and 1940. I'm certainly no huge fan of music of that period (or of anything from before 1996 – that's when I was reprogrammed), and so much of it gets into that dead area best exemplified by weak noir parodies on bad NBC sitcoms where the characters go back in time and one of them is a private eye, and the other is inevitably a "dame" needing help finding her "Johnny" or whatever – resulting in one of the secondary characters crooning standards at a club and inevitably a solider character "going off to fight the war" or whatever. But all that aside, you might as well go back to Billie Holiday to see why people remain fascinated with this lost era, which in my opinion is otherwise almost devoid of interest, no matter what your incontinent grandfather says. The songs collected on this CD are Billie's big hits from the early era (most of them were re-recorded later for other labels and more money), recorded after she had her first big smash with "Strange Fruit." It kicks off with "Them There Eyes," "Swing, Brother, Swing," "Night and Day," "The Man I Love," and "You're Just a No Account" – already five more masterpieces than the fools in Semisonic will ever release – and makes no false step thereafter. The tracks mix familiar standards ("Body and Soul," "I Hear Music," "What is This Going to Get Us?") with lesser known songs that easily hold their own ("Ghost of Yesterday," "I'm Pulling Through," "The Same Old Story"), and almost all of them are definitive readings, some even trademark Lady Day performances ("Laughing at Life" probably my favorite). If there's any drawback at all it's that some of the arrangements tend to blend together, but honestly, anyone listening to these songs for the arrangements is one of those jazz nerds who have a Sunday afternoon show on a local public radio station. With Billie Holiday, it's only the voice that matters. There are so many CDs by Billie Holiday on the market that it's tough to know where to start, especially when you look close and notice that the same songs keep cropping up on a very large percentage of them. Some people prefer the cleaner sound of the Decca and Verve sessions, but Holiday's voice even by the mid-40s was not what it was in her glory days. The Quintessential Vol. 8 is a great starting point, and is probably the best in the series. The Columbia years are what all you Starbucks idiots are thinking about when you want "a Billie Holiday CD." Ouch, who am I angry at, exactly? Maybe I could use me some Starbucks.
Review by Orlo Ogumenn |
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z comps soundtracks stores concerts
