Billie Holiday - The Essential (3CD Deluxe Edition) (2002) (Repost)

The first popular jazz singer to move audiences with the intense, personal feeling of classic blues, Billie Holiday changed the art of American pop vocals forever. More than a half-century after her death, it's difficult to believe that prior to her emergence, jazz and pop singers were tied to the Tin Pan Alley tradition and rarely personalized their songs; only blues singers like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey actually gave the impression they had lived through what they were singing. Billie Holiday's highly stylized reading of this blues tradition revolutionized traditional pop, ripping the decades-long tradition of song plugging in two by refusing to compromise her artistry for either the song or the band. She made clear her debts to Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong (in her autobiography she admitted, "I always wanted Bessie's big sound and Pops' feeling"), but in truth her style was virtually her own, quite a shock in an age of interchangeable crooners and band singers.
With her spirit shining through on every recording, Holiday's technical expertise also excelled in comparison to the great majority of her contemporaries. Often bored by the tired old Tin Pan Alley songs she was forced to record early in her career, Holiday fooled around with the beat and the melody, phrasing behind the beat and often rejuvenating the standard melody with harmonies borrowed from her favorite horn players, Armstrong and Lester Young. (She often said she tried to sing like a horn.) Her notorious private life – a series of abusive relationships, substance addictions, and periods of depression – undoubtedly assisted her legendary status, but Holiday's best performances ("Lover Man," "Don't Explain," "Strange Fruit," her own composition "God Bless the Child") remain among the most sensitive and accomplished vocal performances ever recorded. More than technical ability, more than purity of voice, what made Billie Holiday one of the best vocalists of the century – easily the equal of Ella Fitzgerald or Frank Sinatra – was her relentlessly individualist temperament, a quality that colored every one of her endlessly nuanced performances.

Track List:

CD 1:
01. I Can't Give You Anything But Love (3:32)
02. Loverman (3:20)
03. Back in Your Own Backyard (2:45)
04. Your Mother's Son-in-Law (2:49)
05. Miss Brown To You (3:07)
06. On The Sunny Side Of The Street (3:08)
07. I Love My Man 'Billie's Blues' (4:17)
08. I Wished On The Moon (3:08)
09. Twenty-Four Hours a Day (3:05)
10. What A Little Moonlight Can Do (3:05)
11. No More (2:52)
12. He's Funny That Way (3:06)
13. Nice Work If You Can Get It (3:12)
14. My Man 'Mon Homme' (3:07)
15. Lover, Come Back To Me (3:18)
16. I Must Have That Man (2:59)
17. Easy Living (3:09)
18. All Of Me (3:06)
19. You Go To My Head (2:57)
20. Strange Fruit (3:08)

CD 2:
01. God Bless The Child (3:02)
02. I'll Get By (1:32)
03. Them There Eyes (2:54)
04. Some Other Spring (3:04)
05. These Foolish Things (3:22)
06. Don't Explain (3:27)
07. Yesterdays (3:27)
08. Any Old Time (3:16)
09. I Gotta Right To Sing The Blues (2:54)
10. My Last Affair (3:14)
11. Moanin' Low (3:08)
12. That Ole Devil Called Love (2:58)
13. I Cried For You (3:19)
14. The Way You Look Tonight (3:05)
15. Pennies From Heaven (3:21)
16. I Cover The Waterfont (3:02)
17. A Sailboat In The Moonlight (2:56)
18. Long Gone Blues (3:06)
19. This Years Kisses (3:14)
20. Carelessly (3:11)

CD 3:
01. They Can't Take That Away From Me (3:28)
02. The Man I Love (3:12)
03. Fine and Mellow (3:18)
04. The Mood That I'm In (3:06)
05. Mean to Me (3:15)
06. I Can't Get Started (2:54)
07. Ghost of Yesterday (2:44)
08. Swing Brother Swing (1:56)
09. Did I Remember? (2:57)
10. I'll Never be the Same (3:09)
11. I'm Gonna Lock My Heart (2:14)
12. No Regrets (2:44)
13. A Fine Romance (2:57)
14. Who Loves You? (3:20)
15. I'll Get By (Alternate Take) (3:18)
16. Trav'lin Light (3:24)
17. Solitude (3:16)
18. I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm (3:02)
19. Good Morning Heartache (3:10)
20. These 'n' That 'n' Those (3:20)