Billie Holiday

Before Billie Holiday came along in the early ’30s, most vocalists plied their trade in service to the bigger Tin Pan Alley picture. But there’s a hard-won authenticity in her music, giving us the sense that she wasn’t merely interpreting songs, but living them out. Sure, she possessed a formidable technique and ample poise, but it’s her vulnerability, her fragility, that reaches out and grabs us, proving just how potent bare emotion can be in a bluesy jazz setting. Among these brilliant signature tracks, we’ve decided to open up with the haunting and ever-powerful “Strange Fruit” (1939) and one of her own compositions, the timeless “God Bless the Child” (1956 version).

Hear Holiday accompany Teddy Wilson, early on in her career, in Next Steps.

Although saddled with sub-par material at the beginning of her career, Holiday was still able to deliver remarkably evocative performances. She hit her stride in the mid-’30s, matching wits in small-group settings with legendary figures, such as Benny Goodman, Teddy Wilson, Ben Webster, and hornsman Lester Young — in fact, it was the technique of sax players like Young that partly informed her approach to vocals, and it was he who gave her the lasting moniker Lady Day. “Miss Brown to You,” a collaboration with aforementioned pianist and band leader Wilson, helped put Holiday on the map back in ’35, while her version of Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” (1939) rounded out the decade in style.

Some of Holiday’s most powerful recordings for Verve can be found in Deep Cuts.

Lady Day’s languid phrasing and quavering delivery gave her the expressiveness of a blues artist, conveying deep sadness and personal experience in an unparalleled fashion. Hard living took a devastating toll on her vocal cords, and her late-career output for the Verve label — about a third of her entire recorded catalog — was undertaken with her health failing and her voice fraying. Still, it includes some of her most emotionally resonant sides: “One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)” emerges strongly from the shadow of Sinatra’s celebrated version, and the imperfections of “Don’t Worry ‘Bout Me” only add to the palpable sense of heart-wrenching sadness.

Though she died at the age of 44, Billie Holiday left us with an impressively deep and varied catalog. Her true gift was her ability to seize (or caress) any lyric and tell an intimate and moving story, allowing her unique personality, private suffering, and occasional joys to shine through. Her music penetrates both the mind and the heart, body and soul, reminding us that art is not just about hitting the right musical notes, but the right emotional ones too. Here, you’ll find Holiday in all her shades and colors, as we offer you stone-cold classics, including different renditions of her finest tunes — compare the Decca studio version of “Don’t Explain” to a later Carnegie Hall performance; or “God Bless the Child” recorded at both ends of her career — so that you can hear exactly why Lady Day was beyond compare.