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Time - Man of the Year
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1993-04-08
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REVIEWS, Page 72MUSICTorn from Body and Soul
By JAY COCKS
PERFORMER: BILLIE HOLIDAY
ALBUM: The Complete Billie Holiday on Verve 1945-1959
LABEL: Verve
THE BOTTOM LINE: A boxed set captures, if not the glory
days of a supernal jazz singer, great ones nonetheless.
She said everything like she meant it, and she sang it as
she lived it. "I'm telling you, me and my old voice, it just go
up a little bit and come down a little bit," Billie Holiday says
during a rehearsal interlude on this landmark set. "It's not
legit. I do not got a legitimate voice." True enough. But Billie
Holiday changed every notion of legit -- twisted it right around
into such a newfangled shape that her silken, serpentine style
became the touchstone for all jazz singing. She was, by herself,
the new tradition. Others followed, and some were great. But no
one has ever touched her.
Her life, a parabola of supreme artistry and
self-destruction, was, as she says, up a little bit, then down.
Way down. Her last dire days, her body racked with junk and her
voice cracked like thawing ice, have been rued and romanticized.
When she died in 1959, the superstructure of the legend was
already raised: the instinctive jazz talent, full of early
genius, snuffed out by racism, callow commercialism and
self-indulgence, her best work far behind her.
But Billie Holiday was no butterfly to be broken on such
a greasy wheel. As this triumphant 10-CD collection
demonstrates, she still had greatness in her. She was leading
a reckless life when she laid down her great Columbia sides in
the 1930s and early '40s, and by the time she got to Verve, the
price she was paying for her excesses was becoming more
damaging. You can hear the bills coming due. In a "Jazz at the
Philharmonic" session from 1945, Holiday's debut at Carnegie
Hall, she follows a sexy, freewheeling Body and Soul with a
heart-riving version of Strange Fruit in which her voice cracks
on the final note. By 1957, when she appears at the Newport Jazz
Festival, her voice is slurred, and she has problems not only
keeping up with accompanist Mal Waldron but even catching her
breath.
Holiday dwelled and worked, however, on a plane of pure,
primal feeling, and by that standard -- on her level -- this
package contains peerless music. Like a superb actress, Holiday
knew how to internalize her turmoil. She had too much pride in
her womanhood, her race and her artistry to turn herself into
a sorry paradigm of self-pity. Rather she could make each song
she sang a personal testament -- a confession, a regret, a
reverie. She did not trade on her personal devastation. She used
it till the end, to drive her artistry.
Inevitably, it finally overcame her. This set offers not
only a living piece of her life in music but a kind of oral
history of the last years as well. Producer Phil Schaap has
included 1 1/2 hours of newly discovered material, rehearsals
in 1955 where Lady Day runs through some tunes, runs over a
little history ("Jesus Christ. Man broke my heart and I needed
the loot"), runs down some collaborators ("The dirty bum," she
says of her producer, Norman Granz. "I hate that son of a
bitch") and in general gives a strong account of the spirit that
kept her vital even as her body was giving out.
The rehearsal singing is uncertain, and the speaking voice
has a deep, narcotic slur. But there is no ruin in it. Maybe
truth can speak with a single voice after all: Billie Holiday's.