BILLIE HOLIDAY

The Complete Verve Studio Master Takes

(Verve)

It is difficult to separate Billie Holiday's art from the circumstances of her too-brief life, from 1915 to 1959, especially during the final decade, when the ravages of alcoholism and heroin addiction seemed to seep through cracks that had developed in her voice. The pain often hinted at in her groundbreaking recordings for Columbia and its sister labels in the '30s had come to the fore by the time she recorded for concert promoter Norman Granz's Clef and Verve labels between 1952 and '57. Yet her keen musical intelligence — an almost magical ability to make songs more profound through subtle shifts of pitch and swing of phrase — remained undiminished.

Granz rescued the vocalist from six years at Decca Records, where she was often saddled with hackneyed studio orchestras, and placed her in all-star jazz combo settings, much as John Hammond had done two decades earlier. With Granz, however, her tempos were generally slower, and the material was better because he was not beholden to pressures from song pluggers. Among the tunes Holiday recorded for him are remakes of such favorites as "What a Little Moonlight Can Do," "Strange Fruit," "God Bless the Child," and "Good Morning Heartache," along with "P.S. I Love You" and many other first-rate songs new to her repertoire. "I've been down so long that down don't worry me," she sings on "Stormy Blues," her original lyrics reflecting the melancholy that permeates much of her later work. On "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off," however, she is sublimely playful, following "vanilla" with "chocolate, strawberry" instead of the "sarsaparilla, sassparella" in Ira Gershwin's lyric.

The Gershwin tune is from a series of 1956–57 sessions with trumpeter Harry "Sweets" Edison, tenor saxophonist Ben Webster, and guitarist Barney Kessel that rank among the most magnificent of Holiday's career. They were her last for Granz. The six-disc set then jumps to her final 1959 sessions. Backed by a studio orchestra, she stumbles through 12 numbers, including covers of then-recent hits by Frank Sinatra and Johnny Mathis. These dozen, originally issued on MGM, should not have been appended to her vastly superior 88 for Granz. (Lee Hildebrand)