Billie Holiday: Blue Billie

by Charlie B. Dahan
August 4, 2002

Columbia’s Legacy label breaks up the recent all-encompassing Billie Holiday box set into three different themed collections. The Legacy label takes a look at Billie’s work in the blues idiom on “Blue Billie.” Many of these recordings are quite familiar to many Billie fans, such as “God Bless the Child: and “Night and Day.” But this collection has a nice flow to it that makes an otherwise unexciting collection into a nice compilation that plays well from ...

Billie Holiday: Blue Billie

by Jim Santella
July 1, 2002

Few singers could interpret with the conviction Billie Holiday used in delivering her musical love letters. She had a personal appeal that led us to believe we were listening to a dear relative sing, and that the audience was just us. Whether she was eyeing the waterfront in search of a soon-to-return loved one, or complaining mildly about the way he treats her, Billie Holiday made it all come to life through her recordings. This compilation includes selections that were ...

Billie Holiday: Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday On Columbia (1933-1944)

by Jim Santella
October 1, 2001

In my solitude You haunt me With reveries Of days gone by

Like quite a few other sentimental favorites, Duke Ellington's composition epitomizes the feeling you get when Billie Holiday sings.

At the height of the swing era, Holiday's voice sparkled with an expressive sheen. By 1935, she had developed the characteristic vocal charm for which we'd remember her eternally. The period covered by these ten CDs was a prolific era for Holiday. Just ...

Billie Holiday: Billie Holiday Sings Standards

by Larry Koenigsberg
October 1, 1998

This collection of mostly gems from the great and influential singer who peaked in the late 1930's and early 1940's holds many pleasures: Holiday's caressing, behind-the-beat swing with its great feeling of relaxation, and that quivering slide as her phrase ends; a great repertoire of songs from the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern and their lesser peers, so that the sincerity of her interpretation, usually called on to make gold from garbage, finds material worthy of it; small-band ...

Various Artists: Monterey Jazz Festival: Forty Legendary Years

by Chris M. Slawecki
October 1, 1997

In my wilder, more unforgiving days, I might have merely typed up the personnel and set list and submitted only that in review of Monterey Jazz Festival: Forty Legendary Years, and argued to the powers-that-be that if the reader couldn’t comprehend its abundant magnificence of music from the unadorned facts, my descriptive and persuasive prowess would be of slight use.

I must have grown either more wise or more foolish since then.

Make no mistake: Monterey Jazz Festival: Forty Legendary ...