Billie Holiday - 'Rare Live Recordings (1934-59)'

 

'Rare Live Recordings (1934-59)' is a 5CD set, that was released on the ESP-Disk label in 2007.

This is a nice companion to Billie's studio sessions.  The various broadcasts are never less than interesting.  There are also several concert recordings; notably the Just Jazz evening from California and of her appearance at the Monterey festival in 1958.

The (more or less) chronological presentation opens with a twenty-year-old Billie Holiday performing with Duke Ellington in 1935, followed by a radio broadcast from the Savoy Hotel in New York two years later in which Holiday fronts the Count Basie Orchestra.  The next four discs cover Holiday's career from 1949 to her death in 1959.

The booklet (included in the freeload), is extensive and interweaves discography and biographical chronological information.  The notes are simultaneously informative, insightful, and unfortunately, sprinkled with typographic, editorial, and even factual errors (it brings to mind a high school homework assignment, dashed off the night before it was due).  The most flagrant of which is a statement in reference to the CBS Sound of Jazz television broadcast of December 8, 1957, where the producer claims "...this would also prove to be one of the last performances for baritone saxophonist Harry Carney."  The reference was actually to tenor saxophonist Lester Young, who would die almost exactly four months before the passing of Billie in 1959.  Harry Carney, of course, lived for another 17 years as the bass clef backbone of the Duke Ellington Orchestra.  Errors aside, it nicely maps her personal and artistic transformation between the years 1934 and 1959.

'Rare Live Recordings' set is for those of us who have been smitten for life and cannot get enough Billie Holiday.

For the freeload, post something about Billie that is wildly inaccurate.