Billie Holiday

Epitomizing as absolutely as does Charlie Parker the saga of the jazz genius as tragic soul, Billie Holiday's biography reads like a Dostoyevsky novel: Raped at 10 years old by a neighbor (some accounts say "cousin"), she was sent to a home for wayward girls; in her teens she spent four months in jail for prostitution. Start-ing as a singer in New York's rough-and-tumble speakeasies of the early '30s, she was famous by mid-decade. Heroin and a hard-luck love life began wearing her down in the '40s; with her success, too, came the pressures of song pluggers and aesthetic compromise -- all of Tin Pan Alley's hack songwriters dogged Holiday to sing their tunes. Her personality a tense mix of the rebel and the victim, Holiday's life was wholly struggle; self-destructive, incandescent, she died at 44. And she left music that, at its finest, con-tinues to work like a depth charge -- few singers of any genre can approach its emotional intensity; few singers, either, command her skill.

Remarkably, Holiday's voice wasn't the natural force that some stars (Sarah Vaughan, Aretha Franklin, even Dionne Warwick) have been given. Instead, her greatness lies in how she deployed it; by 1937, she was in full control of her style. Hitting notes against the beat the way all jazz horn players do (an early influence was Louis Armstrong's trumpet), she shaped rhythmic lines ingeniously -- and interpreted lyrics with intuitive savvy. Humor, sass, toughness, and yearning all formed part of her staggering emotive repertoire; Holiday was expert both at laying bare the essence of a great lyric and at tossing off a mediocre one with such happy virtuosity that the words were elevated into pure swinging sound.

A number of massive, worthwhile compilations cover Holiday. Columbia's Quintessential series chronicles her work in the 1933-42 heyday; her sessions are grounded on the elegant piano work of Teddy Wilson, and her range of sidemen extends to such legends as clarinetist Artie Shaw and saxophonist Lester Young. (She cut a few sides, too, with the orchestras of both Benny Goodman and Count Basie.) Volumes 3, 4, and 5 are the creme de la creme: Billie at the peak of her powers. Legacy does a good job of condensing the nine sets of the Quintessential series, including such standouts as "I Must Have That Man," "Having Myself a Time," "God Bless the Child," "Summertime," and "Long Gone Blues." Not only does Columbia repackage the first three of the series in a handsome set, all of her Columbia recordings are available on the gargantuan Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia. In 2002, the label sub-divided its offerings further, focusing alternately on bluesy, romantic, and swinging Holiday. A year later, it reconfigured the catalogue yet again, this time chronologically. The Commodore period covers the years 1939-44, with Billie swinging staunchly. Her work for Decca was string-laden and lush; with its selections recorded between 1944 and 1950, GRP's The Complete Decca Recordings gives us Holiday in her middle period -- not quite so swaggering as during her late-'30s reign nor so powerfully desperate as she became later on.

Holiday's later work continues to divide listeners -- some jazz purists scorn her experiments with richer string arrangements, others consider her in-terpretive approach occasionally melodramatic or strained, and some fans of Billie's early, clearer tone find disturbing the roughness that comes into her voice in the mid-'40s. Listen to The Complete Billie Holiday on Verve, a 10-record collection that documents her 1946-59 period, however, and discover remarkable music that, for all its hit-and-miss technique (sometimes poorly chosen material, sometimes overwhelming instrumentation), is an astonishing spiritual autobiography -- at times, Holiday's singing is the very voice of pain, loss, and hard experience. Lady in Autumn encapsulates the Verve years, and it's a bittersweet triumph; in fact, it's often against the lush backdrop of a full orchestra that she achieves her most eerie effect -- her singing is acid splashed against velvet. Those who appreciate the fearsome, agonized Holiday might also check out Lady in Satin and The Last Recordings; Ray Ellis' somewhat soupy arrangements serve (who knows how intentionally?) to set off Lady Day's singing in ways that can provoke feelings of real terror.

At Carnegie Hall is memorable live Holiday. Of the superabundance of Holiday repackagings, perhaps the best place to start is the Ken Burns Jazz disc. The songs are very intelligently selected and the chronological range is generous. (PAUL EVANS)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide