The Wall Street Journal-20080212-Billie Holiday- Live- A Biography in Music

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Billie Holiday, Live: A Biography in Music

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'Billie must have come from another world," said Roy Eldridge, often heard accompanying her on trumpet, "because nobody had the effect on people she had. I've seen her make them cry and make them happy." Lady Day, as tenor saxophonist Lester Young named Billie Holiday, still has that effect through the many reissues of her recordings, including the recently released "Lady Day: The Master Takes and Singles" of the 1933-44 sessions (Columbia/Legacy, available on Amazon) that established her in the jazz pantheon.

I grew up listening to those sides, which infectiously demonstrated -- as pianist Bobby Tucker, her longtime pianist, noted -- that "she could swing the hardest in any tempo, even if it was like a dirge . . . wherever it was, she could float on top of it." But none of the previous reissues, as imperishable as they are, have as intense a presence of Lady as in the truly historic new five-disc set "Billie Holiday: Rare Live Recordings 1934-1959" on Bernard Stollman's ESP- Disk label (on Amazon, in stores, or at espdisk.com).

This is a model for future retrospectives of classic jazz artists of any era because researcher and compiler Michael Anderson, in his extensive liner notes, provides a timeline of her jazz life -- describing the circumstances of each performance in the context of her evolving career. One example: a live radio remote from Harlem's Savoy Ballroom in 1937 when the 22-year-old singer "began a special association with her comrade, 'The Prez,' Lester Young" -- grooving with the Count Basie band in "Swing Brother Swing."

Producer Anderson is a veteran radio broadcaster (including gigs at WBGO-FM in Newark, N.J., and with Sirius Satellite Radio) and a former jazz drummer. He was in Sun Ra's fabled visionary Arketstra and led bands of his own. As Mr. Anderson was growing up, collecting jazz records, "in my early teens," he told me, "I would have a Billie Holiday day each week where I only played her music."

His devoted immersion in tracking down performances by her from around the country takes us, for example, from an after-hours Harlem club, Clark Monroe's Uptown House, in 1941 to the Eddie Condon radio show in 1949, where Holiday dedicates "Keep on Rainin'" to Bessie Smith, whom she heard on records back in her hometown, Baltimore.

There is a series of extraordinarily moving sets at George Wein's Boston club, Storyville (from which I used to do jazz remotes), in 1951. Billie, backed by just a house rhythm section, is more deeply affecting in "I Cover the Waterfront," "Crazy He Calls Me" and other songs here than in any of her studio interpretations.

Six years later, she was on CBS TV's "The Sound of Jazz," for which Whitney Balliett and I had selected the musicians. In a sequence still being played around the world, she sings her own blues, "Fine and Mellow," with Lester Young among the players.

Once close, Billie and The Prez had grown apart. But on this meeting Young, though in failing health, stood up and played one of the purest blues choruses I'd ever heard, and Billie -- her eyes meeting his -- joined him back in private time, smiling. In the control room, there were tears in my eyes and in those of the director and the sound engineer.

It was on that program that she said, "Anything I sing is part of my life." And her singing became part of many peoples' lives.

She sometimes performed just for friends. During a private recording in this collection, Billie sings "My Yiddishe Mama" and then her own autobiographical song of rebellious independence, "God Bless the Child," to a youngster in the room. I doubt that child fully understood the import of the lyrics then, but the child may well have later in life.

Especially revealing of Billie's evolving approaches to a song is a series of rehearsals with bassist Artie Shapiro and pianist Jimmy Rowles, the master accompanist to jazz vocalists. Between takes, she talks about her early jobs with bands and jokes with Rowles.

What should surprise some of the critics who have concluded that in Billie's last years her voice and spirits showed the wear and strain of her sometime discordant personal life are the final performances here at Storyville in April 1959. Her singing, three months before she died at the age of 44, swings with the verve, the wit and the essential quality that her admirer Ray Charles sums up at the end of the fifth disc: "To be any kind of a singer you have to have feeling, and the one thing you can't teach is feeling." As evidence, Holiday concludes her last 1959 set at Storyville with her own "Billie's Blues":

I ain't good lookin'

and my hair ain't curled,

but my mother, she give me something,

it's gonna carry me through this world.

A year before Billie died, I was talking with Miles Davis about the increasing lament, even among some musicians, that she was breaking down into a much lesser Lady Day.

"You know," Miles said in exasperation at those ears that had turned to tin, "she's not thinking now what she was in 1937. And she still has control, probably more control than then."

At the end of his liner notes for his remarkable achievement in discovering and assembling this "live" musical biography in "Billie Holiday: Rare Live Recordings 1934-1959," Michael Anderson writes: "Later generations have an entire legacy to discover, and veteran enthusiasts can always recollect the times the music of Lady Day was vibrant and alive through everything she had gone through in her life."

Billie once spoke of what Louis Armstrong's trumpet meant to her as a young girl in Baltimore: "He didn't say any words but somehow it just moved me so. It sounded so sad and sweet, all at the same time. It sounded like he was making love to me. That's how I wanted to sing."

It wasn't that, as Roy Eldridge said, she'd come from another world. Rough as her own life had been between songs in this world, Billie became -- and will continue to become -- part of so many lives.

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Mr. Hentoff writes about jazz for the Journal.