Billie Holiday – The Ultimate Collection (2 CDs & 1 DVD)

Inside the confines of the jazz world, she’s understood to be an axiom of American music; her abilities, her profound influence, her truths are held to be self-evident. Elsewhere, the exact nature of Billie Holiday’s musical legacy has probably gotten more than a little vague in the 46 years since her death.

She shares with a few other icon singers (Hank and Patsy, for two) the dubious honor of being used regularly as a reference by many who, clearly enough, have rarely or barely heard their music. Holiday’s florid, abuse-and-drug-ridden life, as described in her autobiography Lady Sings The Blues and brought to the screen (sort of) in Hollywood’s Diana Ross epic, often appears to be more remembered than her records. That persona has attached to the general sense of the singer more firmly even than that gardenia was to her hair, becoming an irresistible attraction for those who romanticize or identify with self-destruction.

The other thing standing in the way of a broader appreciation of Billie Holiday and her performances has been the practical fact that her storied career was divided into fairly discrete stylistic chunks associated with a succession of different record labels. As a result, anyone picking just one of the many “Best Of Lady Day” collections heard but one facet of what she did.

This multimedia set, remarkable in a number of ways, is the first introduction to Holiday’s work to span all the years of her recording career (1935-1958), cutting across labels, from Brunswick to Commodore to Decca to Verve, plus a few side trips. That alone would be appealing enough — but then this set adds her movie and TV performances from across the same years, including some fascinating television not seen since the ’50s, a collection of hundreds of photos, live audio performance tracks, and audio interviews — a bunch with her associates, and one long, telling one she did with Mike Wallace in 1956. If you want just one collection from the Lady’s large recorded output, this one has just become the must-have introduction.

There is ample evidence here of what Holiday sang, and how she sang it. The first disc takes us from her recording start (in 1935, at age 20) through the 1940s. We first encounter her as a band singer at the height of the swing era, easing to the mike with the legendary likes of Benny Goodman on clarinet, Ben Webster or her alter-ego Lester Young on tenor sax, and Teddy Wilson on piano.

The prime reason Holiday is known as a jazz singer is evident from the get-go. She doesn’t scat like her idol Louis Armstrong, and she doesn’t show off the fact that her voice can work like an instrument, as many jazz singers do. She simply has a voice that can sound incredibly like an alto or (in her younger days) tenor sax, and a rhythm sense that’s unmatched.

She attacks a lyric from the beginning, much like Armstrong (who appears on duet tracks and in film clips) — but don’t assume she’s taken Louie’s soul and heart and comic flair and made it all sadder, bluesier. Often the opposite is at work here. The striking thing, on tunes such as her first signature song, “What A Little Moonlight Can Do”, is her swinging playfulness; her away-from-the beat phrasing skips along in these early sides.

That lightness is still there when lyrics of the pop standards she generally sang suggested plain-vanilla “sad” to lesser delineators. There’s a knowing, rueful winking at the situation notable in the celebrated “God Bless The Child” and “Travelin’ Light”. Holiday’s hip capability to comment on what she feels, and makes you feel, is a quality that jazz fans love (though it’s something that fans of “raw roots music only” may not quite get).

By the late 1940s, the playfulness in the sad songs is increasingly matched by a sense of isolation and lonesomeness lurking in even her lighter fare. That, and the fact that she doesn’t pander to jazz’s “careful enunciation” prejudice but instead keeps the singing earthy, are the main reasons Holiday is said to be a “blues singer,” though she only rarely takes on the blues form, per se.

Indeed, by the end of the first disc, when she’s switched to Decca Records and moved from producer John Hammond to the arguably even greater Milt Gabler, she’s being presented as a pop singer. This is the least-heralded part of her career; there are strings and lush arrangements, and she was doing pretty fine (as the film footage makes even more clear). The hits this phase spawned (“Lover Man”, “Solitude”, “My Man”, “Them There Eyes”) are probably better-known from the late ’50s Verve versions; the Decca sound may shock newcomers, but when the lushness works, setting off the simplicity with which she sings, it works really well.

As even a glance at how Holiday has changed by the 1950s television clips shows all too well, she had by then suffered physical deterioration, even devastation. Her range and stamina were not what they had been, but experience added incalculable depth to the song delineation, and an even more reed-like quality to the voice she still possessed. This is the Holiday most often lionized and cried over — and when you hear what all of this does to something as familiar as Arlen & Mercer’s “One For My Baby”, or watch her slowly, slowly bopping along with Lester Young and other friendly giants on TV, you can see why.

One last thing: Holiday’s drug-induced slow nods, her playfulness in blues-inducing situations, her matter-of-factness when she sings a line like “he beats me, too,” should not be confused with passive acceptance. Listen to her no-nonsense response in “Don’t Explain” to the sort of abusive, useless man she too often fell for in life. And there was no playfulness whatsoever in the dirge-toned “Strange Fruit”, a singularly hard-hitting, acidic outcry against lynching, a song so vividly stark in its imagery that it can shock now almost as well as it did then. Something in her was also, always, a fighter — and you hear that on the tracks, too.

These are the qualities, then, that filtered their way into the singing of prime disciples such as Frank Sinatra and obvious contemporary admirers such as Madeliene Peyroux: down-to-earth American talk, fun, and depth. Holiday showed how it’s done.