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A fine video where Lady Day and Satchmo show the world why they came for…

Duration : 2:09

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Technorati Tags: armstrong, billie, blues, brewin, day, holiday, lady, louis, satchmo

I don't really have much by Billie Holiday. I have a few mixed CDs with some of her songs (Strange Fruit, Gloomy Sunday, etc.) that I really love. So what would be the best introductory compilation to get? There are so many to choose from. I'm thinking "Lady Day: The Best of Billie Holiday" but am up for suggestions. I don't have a lot of money to spend on music, so I've got to be picky with what I get. Thanks!

The Quintessential Billie Holiday Volumes 1 and 2, on Columbia Records.

These are Billie's recordings from the very beginning of her career, during the mid 1930's. These recordings have some of the best instrumentalists backing her too: Roy Eldridge, Teddy Wilson, Johnny Hodges, Lester Young, etc.

When it comes to Billie, the early recordings are the best. Billie's life was tough, and it effected her singing. If you listen to an early recording and one from the 1950's, you can easily hear the difference in energy in her voice.

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Rare Live Footage of one of the firtst
anti rascism songs ever.

Duration : 0:2:33

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Technorati Tags: antiracism, billie, black, fruit, holiday, jazz, singers, strange, white

It was in Harlem in the early 1930s that she started singing for tips in various night clubs. According to legend, penniless and facing eviction, she sang “Body and Soul” in a local club and reduced the audience to tears. She later worked at various clubs for tips, ultimately landing at Pod’s and Jerry’s, a well known Harlem jazz club. Her early work history is hard to verify, though accounts say she was working at a club named Monette’s in 1933 when she was discovered by talent scout John Hammond.[2] Hammond managed to get Holiday recording sessions with Benny Goodman and booked her for live performances in various New York clubs. In 1935 her career got a big push when she recorded four sides that became hits, including “What A Little Moonlight Can Do” and “Miss Brown To You”. This landed her a recording contract of her own, and from 1935 to 1942 she laid down masters that would ultimately become an important segment of early American jazz. Sometimes referred to as her “Columbia period” (after her record company), these recordings — made for subsidiary labels including Okeh, Vocalion, and Brunswick — represent a large portion of her total body of work. During this period, the American music industry was still segregated, and many of the songs Holiday was given to record were intended for the black jukebox audience. She was often not considered for the ‘best’ songs of the day, which were reserved for white singers. However, Holiday’s style and fresh sound soon caught the attention of musicians across the nation, and her popularity began to climb. Peggy Lee, who began recording with Benny Goodman in the early 1940s, is often said to have emulated Holiday’s light, sensual style. In 1936 she was working with Lester Young, who gave her the now-famous nickname “Lady Day” (Holiday would in turn begin calling Lester Young “Prez”). Holiday joined Count Basie in 1937 and Artie Shaw in 1938. She was one of the first black women to work with a white orchestra, an impressive accomplishment at the time. Billie’s Blues, a biography by British jazz historian John Chilton, details this period of her life.

Although the title could only have been coined by a marketing department, The Ultimate Collection deserves the highest of praise. It is not only the first American compilation to survey Billie Holiday’s entire 25year career and astutely, at that but it also includes a DVD that presents the lion’s share of her film and TV appearances, a full discography, and an interactive timeline. The audio discs spotlight all of Holiday’s most innovative material, from the musically pioneering “Billie’s Blues” and “Lover Man,” in which she refined the perpetually coarse female blues form and virtually invented the slowburn torch song, to the socially progressive “Strange Fruit” and “God Bless the Child,” wherein she yoked reform concerns to beguiling pop songs and became a master of the protest song. (As it should be, the 1939 of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” seems much more recent than the 1939 when a majority of Southerners felt lynching was justified in case of sexual assault.) The bulk of the material rightly comes from her Verve and Columbia libraries, but there are many inclusions from her breathtaking Decca and Commodore catalogs, as well as a superb version of “Trav’lin Light” from a 1942 Capitol session with accompaniment from (surprise) the outmoded but effective Paul Whiteman Orchestra. Fittingly, the program begins with one of Holiday’s first sessions in 1933, when she provided a short vocal chorus over a reading of “Miss Brown to You” by Teddy Wilson His Orchestra and it ends, on the DVD portion, with her reprising another 1933 title for the television program Art Ford’s Jazz Party one year before her death.

- John Bush, All Music Guide

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