Billie Holiday – The Commodore Recordings

There are two remedies for days that feel achy and devoid of color or for moments spent fantasizing about different time zones, distant continents, and paid vacations. One, walk into your room, shut the door, dim the lights and pour a drink. Two, put on an LP by Lady Day. The First Lady of Jazz will transport you through time and space with vocals so smokey they provide the perfect soundtrack to any holiday, real or imagined.

Billie Holiday blew up the New York jazz scene in the 1940s. The vulnerable shake caught in her low vibrato and velvety-soft pronunciations always posed a tantalizing fusion of blues and jazz. Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong are hailed as her musical inspirations but Billie created a sound entirely her own. Despite her short life (1915-1959), she sang for over twenty-five years and recorded with the likes of Lester Young, Count Basie, Teddy Wilson and Benny Goodman.

You can’t go wrong with any of her compilations or full-length records, live or in studio. The first Holiday record I ever bought was an a-typical collection of the hits, “Lover Man,” “Swing Brother Swing,” and “Don’t Explain.” The Commodore Recordings are a worthwhile investment and include the all time favorite track, “I’ll be Seeing You,” a Bing Crosby number one hit that makes any goodbye feel less like a loss and more like a pause. “Fine and Mellow” was a jukebox smash and “Strange Fruit” a once controversial track based on a poem about lynching, written by Abel Meeropol (pseudonym “Lewis Allan”), are all given time to take their time on the LP. One interesting historical fact is co-founder of Commodore Records Jack Crystal was the father of actor Billy Crystal, who occasionally hired Billie to babysit the Crystal jr.

Holiday was notorious for instigating an emotional call and response from her audience. The heartache and joy that riddled her life is poignantly addressed in her music, drawing listeners closer to their own private moments. Lady Day sang in the U.S. and Europe, spent time in jail, worked as a twenty-dollar call girl, was paid only thirty-five dollars for her first album, struggled with heroin addiction and fell in love with all the wrong men. She lived out a tattered and smashed life in the public eye. The music she made is testament to the relationship between love and pain and how sometimes sweet misery ain’t all that bad.

Get it from DISCOGS or AMAZON