Billie Holiday: Last Recording

BILLIE HOLIDAY: LAST RECORDING (1959)

1) All Of You; 2) Sometimes I'm Happy; 3) You Took Advantage Of Me; 4) When It's Sleepy Time Down South; 5) There'll Be Some Changes Made; 6) 'Deed I Do; 7) Don't Worry 'bout Me; 8) All The Way; 9) Just One More Chance; 10) It's Not For Me To Say; 11) I'll Never Smile Again; 12) Baby, Won't You Please Come Back.

It might actually be a good idea to forget about this album entirely, and let history record that it was Lady In Satin that served as Billie's swan song; well, technically it did, since this «follow-up», originally titled just Billie Holiday, was not released until a few days (or weeks) after the lady's death in July 1959 (for the record, from complications brought about by liver cirrhosis, rather than the stereotypical «overdosing» — not that she never overdosed, of course).

The sessions, held in March 1959, were again directed by Ray Ellis, although this time, the or­chestra took a few steps back, letting a jazz band in. As much as we could all be skeptical about Ray's orchestral sentimentality clashing with Billie's style, I almost sort of miss it on this album. Clearly, the idea was to record something a little lighter, poppier, more upbeat and perhaps even optimistic. And maybe — maybe — Billie was even up for it: at the very least, her voice notice­ably crackles less and sounds a little more vibrant and ringing throughout the sessions, somehow almost free of the «old woman rasp» so frequently catching up with her on the last Verve albums and on Lady In Satin.

But it does not sound very natural or believable, this attempt at previewing the sound and style of Nancy Wilson. At least, not in the overall context. Billie's voice and strength may have been fail­ing in the Fifties, yet she and her producers countered this with finding the right mood for those levels — all that quiet nocturnal melancholy for penthouse clients etc. Now, just as she was enter­ing the last months of her career, even if nobody knew it (but many still sensed it), Columbia tried to get her to cheer up again, right to the levels of twenty years ago. Even without all this knowledge, the fakeness of the effort shines through; with this knowledge, the album stirs up all sorts of unpleasant feelings, starting with pity and ending with disgust (or, rather, vice versa, be­cause the album opener, ʽAll Of Youʼ, beats all the other tracks in terms of upbeatness and happi­ness and sounds particularly skewed).

Of course, from a certain historical point of view, these sessions could have been a sort of «musi­cal therapy», and if they made Billie happy for three days in the midst of the misery, that is just good. And it would be ridiculous to say that these performances are «wooden» or «emotionless»: Billie never ever recorded if she didn't feel like recording, as all the huge archive boxsets prove to us these days. But for the «listener», not the «biographer», this Last Recording is useless. If you want a genuinely happy Billie, go for the early Columbia years; if you want a genuinely mise­rable Billie, go for Lady In Satin; if you live in a penthouse, go for the Verve collection. This record is just a collector's memento, little more, and, although it is not «awful» by any means, I still give it a thumbs down — the only explicit one in Lady Day's entire discography.

This pretty much completes the discography runthrough. In addition to the material collected on these LPs and later-issued boxsets, the archives contain numerous alternate takes, demos, etc., most of which you can find on even bigger boxsets, but I do not recommend going for «Complete Verve», etc., unless Billie is your life or unless you are attracted to the coolness of having these bulky objects gathering dust (and, perhaps, accumulating collectible value) on your shelves. It is a very good thing that they are available, though: they serve to emphasize Billie's legendary status and ensure a modest, but stable, level of popularity among future generations of listeners. At the expense of other, unjustly forgotten, legends, perhaps — yet why should we complain that, if there must be only one female jazz vocalist remembered from the pre-rock'n'roll era, it should be Bil­lie? She was not simply following the rules of the formula, nor was she setting them; all her life, she worked against the current, and the fact that for the most part she did so without out­stepping the limits of The Songbook only makes it more admirable. Like the Beatles in their pro­fessional sphere, or like Shakespeare in his, this is one hell of a legend to deserve «unforgettable» status, no matter how trite that may sound to hard-working connoisseurs of the genre.

Billie Holiday: Lady In Satin

BILLIE HOLIDAY: LADY IN SATIN (1958)

1) I'm A Fool To Want You; 2) For Heaven's Sake; 3) You Don't Know What Love Is; 4) I Get Along Without You Very Well; 5) For All We Know; 6) Violets For Your Furs; 7) You've Changed; 8) It's Easy To Remember; 9) But Beautiful; 10) Glad To Be Unhappy; 11) I'll Be Around; 12) The End Of A Love Affair.

It is a little ironic that Billie's final completed record was recorded for the very same label that hosted her original recordings — by early 1958, she was out of Verve and back on Columbia. Of course, by that time it was already impossible for Columbia to present her the same way they did in the 1930s, that is, lightweight jazz entertainment with a pinch of intelligence and a shot of indi­viduality — Billie was so frail already that trying to rev her up would, at worst, have killed her, at best, have made her sound utterly ridiculous.

Instead, to celebrate this new re-beginning and try out something different, the entire album was recorded with strings — a full orchestra conducted by Ray Ellis. This was not the first time Bil­lie was being backed that way: most of her Decca sessions included lush strings. But, odd enough, this seems to be her most well-known recording on which she has orchestral support — either be­cause it happened to be her last record, or, maybe, because her voice was so thin and crackling, it's almost as if the orchestra were shining through it all the time. On her Decca records, the vio­lins tend to stay in the background; here, Ray Ellis dominates the proceedings at least as much as the lady herself, perhaps more.

Lush orchestral backing was quite en vogue at the time for jazz singers and crooners (e. g. on El­la's Songbooks), and Billie herself never specifically preferred small combos to big bands — in fact, she seems to have had the time, before her death, to acknowledge Lady In Satin as her per­sonal favorite. The arrangements themselves will probably fail to please those who are allergic to syrup: going very heavy on strings and very light on brass, adding a moody (if not to say «ghost­ly») background choir for most of the songs, conventional, predictable, and completely undis­tin­gui­shable from each other. So will the songs — just a bunch of additional stuff from the Song­book, all of them new for Billie but still feeling as if she'd already sung them all before. Nothing too bluesy, nothing too jazzy, nothing too fast, almost everything lethargically slow. No high­lights, no lowlights. In fact, why bother at all?

Well, for one thing, the whole album sounds like a testament. She was not explicitly dying yet (still had more than a year to go), but it is clear that all of the systems were failing, and this phy­sical deterioration and pain somehow got... not «reflected» in the performance, but rather «con­verted» into the performance, if you can follow the difference. Her voice occasionally quivers as if in silent tears, but these are neither «real» tears nor «fake» tears, rather like a slightly mannered, theatrical take on suffering delivered by a genuinely suffering person. If this does not suffice to describe her performance, let me just state that the performance is simply unique — except it has to be listened to very closely (one or two songs at a time may be enough; there is no need to sit through the entire session if you do not feel like it), and your mind has to set the orchestra back a few feet to suck in all the pain. Pain, pain, pain. The Songbook was never really intended for that kind of pain — it's a wonder the whole thing worked in the end.

Note, though, that weak or strong, Billie never ever lost her knack at phrasing, her ability to place her own accents within each performance. This is why her voice, even at its crackliest and feeb­lest, still stands the test; complaints about her lack of singing power in these late years are useless, since, at this point, it was her weakness itself that gave her extra power, the kind of which she could never have twenty years earlier. It is a power to conjure pity, but «pity» as some sort of noble emotion, rather than just the gut feeling you get when bypassing a legless hobo. If it were the latter, we would just «pity» the lady — «oh God, she must have been in some real deep shit back then» — and forget Lady In Satin in favor of her earlier records (even the late-period Verve sessions sound like Ode To Joy in comparison to this). But there is this deep, weird attrac­tive force here that elevates the record to genuine tragic status; and this, in a sense, almost makes Lady In Satin the most important album in her career — despite its numerous flaws, or, rather, due to these flaws.

Never make the mistake of making this your introduction to Billie (some of the «best-of» jazz lists I have seen were stupid enough to make it «the obligatory B. H. inclusion» instead of the much more diagnostic Commodore sessions), but never make the mistake of bypassing it, either, if you care at all about the reflection of pain in art. At a certain point, if you get into it pretty deep, Lady In Satin is almost terrifying. But there is probably no need to wind it up to that effect; Bil­lie herself, always the icon of restraint and elegance, would probably not want us to judge it that way. She probably wouldn't say no to a simple thumbs up, though.

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Billie Holiday: All Or Nothing At All

BILLIE HOLIDAY: ALL OR NOTHING AT ALL (1958)

1) Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me; 2) Cheek To Cheek; 3) Ill Wind; 4) Speak Low; 5) We'll Be Together Again; 6) All Or Nothing At All; 7) Sophisticated Lady; 8) April In Paris; 9) I Wished On The Moon; 10) But Not For Me; 11) Say It Isn't So; 12) Our Love Is Here To Stay.

Last of the three albums from the January 1957 sessions, and, consequently, Billie's last album for Verve. Once again, a mixed bag here, combining songs that were almost tailor-made for the lady; songs which she is able to permanently mark with her seal of approval; and a few annoying missteps that should have never been tried at all — yes, I am talking about ʽCheek To Cheekʼ, a song that was genuinely corny from the beginning even for Irving Berlin's standards, and one that could not ever be successfully «holidayed» even with a change in tonality. For that matter, ʽI Wished On The Moonʼ, reprised here from its original 1935 incarnation, also sounds like a bit of sorry nostalgia — at this point in her career, conveying pure, naïve joy was an impossibility.

Conversely, the highlights would probably include Duke Ellington's ʽDo Nothing Till You Hear From Meʼ — slow, lazy, subversive, and with just a tiny pinch of sarcasm in the "...and you never will" resolution of each chorus; Harold Arlen's ʽIll Windʼ, with a mini-epic bluesy arrangement and excellent guitar-vocal dueting between Billie and Barney Kessel; and the cute rumba-jazz of ʽSpeak Lowʼ, which, if I am not mistaken, must be the only time Billie ever took on Kurt Weill in her entire career. I wish I could say the same about the title track (e. g. about how Billie destroys Sinatra's version or something like that), but it sounds fairly hookless to me.

With Ellington, Weill, and the «early blue-eyed soul» representative Frankie Laine (ʽWe'll Be Together Againʼ) sharing the same album with the obligatory G.A.S. representatives, All Or No­thing At All is, technically, one of Billie's most «diverse» LPs; but, of course, all of the songs are processed more or less in the same way, reducing surprise effects and novelty factors. Still, bar­ring ʽCheek To Cheekʼ which, for me, is one of the few true moments of displeasure in Billie's late career period, it proves that the 1957 sessions, as always, were consistent throughout, and I would give all three albums one collective thumbs up — put all the songs together, fish out the «too happy» ones, and Billie's going out of Verve with plenty of verve.

Billie Holiday: Songs For Distingue Lovers

BILLIE HOLIDAY: SONGS FOR DISTINGUE LOVERS (1957)

1) Day In, Day Out; 2) A Foggy Day; 3) Stars Fell On Alabama; 4) One For My Baby; 5) Just One Of Those Things; 6) I Don't Know What Time It Was.

The second album released from the same sessions as Body And Soul, Songs For Distingué Lovers commands even fewer words than its predecessor. It also has fewer songs (just six titles), not to mention the exact same backing musicians, general attitude, and chronological set of songs — not a single one going back to anything later than 1943.

One single difference is that, on this particular batch, not a single track is a re-recording — all six were selected as brand new «expe­rimental» puppies for the lady to sink her (rottin') teeth in. But that only makes the album harder to assess on its own, since there is nothing to compare it to — unless we start seriously discussing what it is exactly that the lady brings to 'One For My Baby' that is so different from Sinatra's classic version. Well, just about the same thing that distingui­shes any other tune tackled by both Holiday and Sinatra — she's her, and he's him.

For some reason, when re-released fourty years later on CD, it was Songs For Distingué Lovers rather than the two albums around it that got the first privilege — with six more songs from Body And Soul and All Or Nothing At All tacked on as bonuses. Perhaps the Verve people thought the exquisite French epithet «classy», unlike the others; the fact that they even used it at all back in 1957 means that they were consciously trying to market Billie as «penthouse» music for rich romantic couples... which, to me, seems like cheapening the issue.

The arrangements — yes, all of them typically «penthouse» arrangements; but the idea of «spiritually enjoying» Billie sing with half-drawn shades, a glass of Bordeaux, and a «that special someone» in an evening dress seems rather cheap and, in any case, much too stereotypical for a singer as dismissive of stereotypes as Billie. Above all else, all of these songs reflect pain, and it is rather hard to enjoy pain, let alone with a glass of Bordeaux (although, come to think of it, a big enough glass could make it easy to enjoy anything). Even though there is nothing even remotely close in spirit to a 'God Bless The Child' on Songs For Distingué Lovers, all of these songs — never mind the syrupy or corny lyrics — are delivered in Billie's usual late-period ragged tones, and these tones are not «enjoyable»: they are «experienceable», and, as such, do not really re­quire any additional settings, substances, or seductions.

Billie Holiday: Body And Soul

BILLIE HOLIDAY: BODY AND SOUL (1957)

1) Body And Soul; 2) They Can't Take That Away From Me; 3) Darn That Dream; 4) Let's Call The Whole Thing Off; 5) Comes Love; 6) Gee Baby, Ain't I Good To You?; 7) Embraceable You; 8) Moonlight In Vermont.

Billie's last recording sessions for Verve, former Clef, were held in January 1957 and yielded enough new material for three albums, but, unfortunately, not enough for even one properly auto­nomous review. They simply continue the trend of Music For Torching and Velvet Mood, with another batch of re-recordings of old Columbia and Commodore day cuts, mixed with barrel-scra­ping as the lady and her backing crew keep searching for Tin Pan Alley material that has, so far, managed to avoid the Holiday touch.

And, just as before, the effect of these songs depends on whether Billie and the band decide to cast them in their original «playful» mood, or reinterpret them in a darker and more personal-intimate vein. Thus, 'Let's Call The Whole Thing Off' with its dialectal humor works poorly; 'Gee Baby, Ain't I Good To You?', with its slower tempo and bluesy atmosphere, works better, but is still cast in a «light entertainment for gentlemen with big purses» manner. But 'Comes Love', pin­ned to an ominous opening electric guitar riff from Barney Kessel and punctuated by Harry Edi­son's equally ominous trumpet lines, works achingly well — they almost manage to turn it into some sort of somber German cabaret-style vaudeville number à la Marlene Dietrich (only with a less mannequinnish singer), a style not entirely familiar to Billie up to this point.

Other highlights include the title track and 'Embraceable You', both expanded to twice the run­ning length of the original versions, not so much by the instrumental interludes (Barney Kessel does get a nice moody guitar solo in addition to all the trumpets and saxes), as they are by drastic slowing down of tempos — the slower it gets, the more thin nuances can be squeezed in­side the vocalization of each single syllable.

That said, it does seem a little nagging that, as late as 1957, Billie was so stubbornly clinging to the same formula. No one would ask her to sing Chuck Berry, of course, but jazz and pop sen­si­bi­li­ties, by the late 1950s, had evolved way beyond pre-War Tin Pan Alley. Her early recordings for Verve could, from a certain point of view, still be considered mildly «hip», but these ones al­most could be accused of «lazy conservatism» — now that the lady's status as a living legend was codified, she could be covering the entire works of Ira Gershwin and Rodgers & Hammerstein in chronological (or alphabetical) order and there would still be a market for this.

On the other hand, let's face it — Billie Holiday is one of the very few reasons that the entire works of Rodgers & Hammerstein still have to be remembered fondly; and in 1957, there could be no better frontperson for the Tin Pan Alley mindset than Billie. Which makes this strong igno­rance of the changing times all the more intriguing — «unyielding old guard», etc. (In reality, though, it would be stupid to expect Billie to «modernize» her setlists: the idea that an artist must constantly «progress» in order to retain credibility did not yet exist in the 1950s).

Billie Holiday: Lady Sings The Blues

BILLIE HOLIDAY: LADY SINGS THE BLUES (1956)

1) Lady Sings The Blues; 2) Trav'lin' Light; 3) I Must Have That Man; 4) Some Other Spring; 5) Strange Fruit; 6) No Good Man; 7) God Bless The Child; 8) Good Morning Heartache; 9) Love Me Or Leave Me; 10) Too Marvelous For Words; 11) Willow Weep For Me; 12) I Thought About You.

This is not a very important release for those who savor Billie's career in chronological order; ne­vertheless, it is still one of her best-known late period albums, since it is somewhat conceptual – released as a «companion piece» to her famous autobiography of the same name: ghost­written, actually, by William Dufty from Billie's recollections, but still historically important for a number of reasons (a black artist candidly writing about the intricacies of childhood abuse and heroin ad­diction was still quite a novel thing in 1956). The franchise then culminated in a couple shows at Carnegie Hall in December, where Billie's performances were accompanied by readouts from the book (a large chunk of the show is available on the Complete Verve boxset as well).

Thus, Lady Sings The Blues is somewhat of a retrospective album – all re-recordings, except for the title track, specially written by Billie herself for the occasion, and, today, one of her visit cards, along with 'Strange Fruit' and 'God Bless The Child', which, not coincidentally, are also re­recorded for this session of June 1956. (Four of the songs are, however, taken from an earlier ses­sion in September 1954, again, creating a slightly uncomfortable dissonance between two diffe­rent stages of the lady's voice).

The backing tracks on the session are nothing outstanding to write home about (where have you gone, Mr. Peterson?), and the old classics are not exactly reinvented, either: the best I can say about this performance of 'Strange Fruit' is that the subtle horror is still there, neither grown nor diminished. In a way, one could say that, as Billie got older, her voice was compensating for extra hoarseness and creakiness with an additional thin thread of wisdom-and-experience, so I could understand someone preferring this version of 'God Bless The Child', burdened with twenty-five additional years of ups and downs, to the original Columbia recording.

But then it may just be better to take this record as one large whole — lady does not so much sing the blues here as she sings her past, alternating darker and lighter numbers to come up with an ad­equate representation of her own importance. And 1956 was an important year for her: on the he­els of clever (and totally justifiable, in this case) marketing, she at least had the pleasure of recei­ving widespread acclaim and acceptance — crowned with the Carnegie Hall performances — during her lifetime, even if she did not get to enjoy it too long.

Billie Holiday: Velvet Mood

BILLIE HOLIDAY: VELVET MOOD (1956)

1) Prelude To A Kiss; 2) When Your Lover Has Gone; 3) Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone; 4) Nice Work If You Can Get It; 5) I Got A Right To Sing The Blues; 6) What's New?; 7) I Hadn't Anyone Till You; 8) Everything I Have Is Yours.

Not a lot to say here, since, apparently, all of the songs date from the same session as Music For Torching — same players, same type of repertoire, same level of inspiration. So much the same that, apparently, the album has not been re-released since its original market venture, even if, all things considered, it could have constituted a tremendously strong double-LP package on one CD. But, in any case, all of the tracks are out there on Complete Verve.

Re-recordings here include 'Nice Work If You Can Get It' — another of the lady's old Columbia upbeat rocking horses, and, consequently, another odd choice on an album dominated by smoky melancholy blues; 'Everything I Have Is Yours', which she'd already cut for Verve two years ago, but essays here once again in a slightly higher register; and the Commodore years classic 'I Got A Right To Sing The Blues', taken here at a slower pace, ornated with a pompous trumpet backing and featuring a long guitar solo from Barney Kessel — in other words, treated as «blues-de-luxe» rather than a brief aggressive outburst. Not very convincing, but passable.

Although, as usual, the record is very even, and its predictability is only disrupted in the subtlest of ways (e. g. Jimmy Rowles playing celeste on 'I Hadn't Anyone Till You'), my own tastes choose the 1931 standart 'When Your Lover Has Gone' as the outstanding high­light (a choice in which, surprisingly, I happen to coincide with the late James Dean, who declared it his favorite song). There is just something utterly mysterious about her phrasing on the title line — Billie may not be the master of complex technique, but she is the master of tone and pitch. The 4:32-4:58 segment of the song is, like, the ultimate benchmark in high quality choice of wavelength, if you know what I mean. More thumbs coming up.

Billie Holiday: Music For Torching

BILLIE HOLIDAY: MUSIC FOR TORCHING (1955)

1) It Had To Be You; 2) Come Rain Or Come Shine; 3) I Don't Want To Cry Anymore; 4) I Don't Stand A Ghost Of A Chance With You; 5) A Fine Romance; 6) Gone With The Wind; 7) I Get A Kick Out Of You; 8) Isn't This A Lovely Day.

Groping blindly in the dark, perhaps, but this session from August 1955 seems to me to find Bil­lie in a slightly better state than her previous one, and the entire record is a highlight of her last years on Clef/Verve. All of the material, with the exception of 'A Fine Romance' that she did ear­lier for Columbia, is recorded for the first time, even if The Songbook is still the only available source. Of the session players, only Benny Carter stands out on alto saxophone; the rest provide solid backing rather than counterpoints. But that's fine: on this record, Billie had no desperate need of any counterpoints. She carries it all with bravery and finesse.

We get as far into the past here as 'It Had To Be You', which was originally recorded in 1924 by several people, including Marion Harris; but in order to appreciate Billie's version, it is, of course, advisable to select something glitzy in contrast – the Barbra Streisand take, perhaps? Or, if this seems unjust and skewed, we could do with respectable earlier interpretations, such as Betty Hut­ton's. But they are all normal in their emotional impact. Billie, on the other hand, with each pas­sing year seems to have been descending into an emotional world all her own — so much so that some might fall for the trap and declare this here singing cold, perfunctory, and passionless.

That would be a wrong move — if anything, her purely technical tricks over the years became more diverse and subtle. The ever-slowing tempos give her plenty of space to stretch out the syl­lables, practice that little vibrato, and control her «creaky» and «breathy» levels with the same precision that a Jimi Hendrix might control his whammy bar. And it may be that I am writing about it in this particular review simply because she is so perfectly captured on this album, too: for once, her voice looms large and heavy over all the instruments without any distracting echo effects. Then again, I may be just imagining things to fill up space.

Anyway, as usual, there are no high- or lowlights, and the album is quite aptly titled, even if, up­on second thought, something like 80% of all of Billie's recordings are certified «torch songs». (May also be the reason why 'A Fine Romance', with its slightly cheerier attitude and faster tem­po, sits here somewhat uncomfortably among all the gloom – but it's still a first-rate recording). Hence, another thumbs up, and, in addition to it all, finally a version of 'Come Rain Or Come Shine' that one can always throw on without a hint of embarrassment. Too bad Billie didn't have the time to record all the popular songs of the first half of the XXth century – that would be a great excuse for burning up so much schlocky vinyl.