CD1
1. Your Mother's Son-In-Law
2. What a Little Moonlight Can Do
3. What a Night, What a Moon, What a Girl
4. I'm Painting the Town Red
5. It's Too Hot for Words
6. Twenty-Four Hours a Day
7. Yankee Doodle Never Went to Town
8. Eeny Meeny Miney Mo
9. If You Were Mine
10. You Let Me Down
11. Life Begins When You're in Love
12. These Foolish Things
13. I Cried for You
14. Guess Who
15. Did I Remember?
16. No Regrets
17. Summertime
18. Billie's Blues (I Love My Man)
19. A Fine Romance
20. I Can't Pretend
21. Easy to Love
22. The Way You Look Tonight
23. Who Loves You?
24. Pennies from Heaven
25. I Can't Give You Anything but Love
CD2
1. If My Heart Could Only Talk
2. Please Keep Me in Your Dreams
3. This Year's Kisses
4. The Mood That I'm In
5. Moanin’ Low
6. Mean to Me
7. I'll Never Be the Same
8. Me, Myself and I
9. Getting Some Fun Out of Life
10. Trav'lin 'All Alone
11. He's Funny That Way
12. Nice Work If You Can Get It
13. Can't Help Loving Dat Man
14. When You're Smiling
15. When a Woman Loves a Man
16. You Go to My Head
17. If I Were You
18. Havin’ Myself a Time
19. I Wish I Had You
20. I'm Gonna Lock My Heart
21. Any Old Time
22. I Can't Get Started
23. You Can't Be Mine
24. Everybody's Laughing
25. Here It Is Tomorrow Again
26. I'll Never Fail You
27. They Say
CD3
1. More Than You Know
2. Long Gone Blues
3. I Gotta Right To Sing The Blues
4. Swing, Brother, Swing
5. Night and Day
6. The Man I Love
7. Ghost of Yesterday
8. Body and Soul
9. Time on My Hands
10. I Hear Music
11. The Same Old Story
12. St. Louis Blues
13. Georgia on My Mind
14. Romance in the Dark
15. All of Me
16. God Bless the Child
17. Am I Blue?
18. I Cover the Waterfront
19. Love Me or Leave Me
20. Gloomy Sunday
21. It's a Sin to Tell a Lie
22. Until the Real Thing Comes Along
23. My Old Flame
24. Lover Man
25. No More
26. That Old Devil Called Love
CD4
1. Don't Explain
2. You Better Go Now
3. Good Morning Heartache
4. Big Stuff
5. Baby, I Don't Cry Over You
6. I'll Look Around
7. The Blues Are Brewin '
8. Guilty
9. Easy Living
10. Solitude
11. I Loves You Porgy
12. Them There Eyes
13. My Sweet Hunk o’ Trash
14. Somebody’s on my Mind
15. This is Heaven to Me
16. Rocky Mountain Blues
17. Blue Moon
18. You Go to my Head
19. Love for Sale
20. Tenderly
21. My Man
22.Yesterdays
23. I Can’t Face the Music
24. Willow Weep for Me
25. Gone with the Wind
CD5
1. Lady Sings the Blues
2. Trav’lin’ Light
3. I Must Have That Man
4. Strange Fruit
5. No Good Man
6. Cheek to Cheek
7. All or Nothing at All
8. Sophisticated Lady
9. April in Paris
10. I Wished on the Moon
11. A Foggy Day
12. But Not For Me
13. Stars Fell on Alabama
14. Say It Isn’t So
15. Our Love is here to Stay
16. You Don’t Know What Love Is.
17. For Heaven’s Sake
18. For All We Know
19. I’m a Fool to Want You
20. You’ve changed
21. Violets for Your Furs
About ten years ago, a record company issued a set of ten CDs containing a wealth of Billie Holiday recordings. This new compilation consists of five CDs,
so I guess we are getting about half the number on the previous release, although this should be sufficient for all but the keenest Billie Holiday
completest. At least this collection includes all of Billie’s recordings which I would regard as essential.
The great thing about Holiday’s recordings – especially those from the 1930s – is that she was so often accompanied by all-star groups of musicians. Teddy
Wilson in particular asssembled backing bands which included such great names as Jack Teagarden, Ben Webster, Johnny Hodges and Roy Eldridge. The result
was that you could hear short but memorable solos from some of the best jazzmen available – and there was the added pleasure of recognizing a familiar
sound. Was that really Benny Goodman on the opening track? It certainly was. And of course there was Billie’s perfect accompanist, tenorist Lester Young,
who can be heard getting a larger and larger slice of the solo space. Note how, on This Year’s Kisses, Lester supplies exactly the right
introduction for Holiday’s evocative voice.
Teddy Wilson’s piano is masterly on such tracks as What A Night, What A Moon, What A Girl and throughout his sessions he is a dependably inventive
resource which holds the groups together. The collection takes us from 1933 to 1958 – altgough the later tracks are represented less generously than the
early ones. Right from the second track, you can hear Billie relaxing into her charactistic approach, holding back or venturing forward on the beat,
accentuating the swing seemingly effortlessly, while her cohorts supply the perfect accompaniment. Songs like Night and Day and All Of Me
show how Billie often diverged wildly from a melody although it seldom seemed to matter.
When we come to Strange Fruit, it appears as if Billie’s career had been leading up to this moment, as the purveyor of torch songs switched
unexpectedly to a song about her brethren being torched. Unfortunately this version of Strange Fruit is marred by an over-melodramatic trumpet.
For anybody who hasn’t got a fair amount of Billie Holiday in their record collection, this album fits the bill nicely.
Tony Augarde
www.augardebooks.co.uk
CD Reviews
Le Chant du Monde 574 2277.81
