Past Retro Reviews: Billie Holiday: Songs For Distingué Lovers (Revisited)

        I decided to launch a new series to imagine myself as a critic at the end of the 60s and start of the 70s, and to rectify certain reviews from Rolling Stone magazine and Creem. This new feature is a retrospective of work from decades before.  This was written as if it was 1968. This not meant to be contrarian, but to offer a more balanced perspective. All the albums reviewed are indeed classic albums. 

Billie Holiday – Songs For Distingué Lovers (1958) Revisited

****1/2

Producer: Norman Granz

Musicians: Billie Holiday, Harry Edison, Ben Webster, Jimmy Rowles, Barney Kessell, Red Mitchell, Alvin Stoller, Mondragon, Larry Bunker

Songs and music: Day In, Day Out, A Foggy Day, Star Fell On Alabama, One More For My Baby (And One More For The Road), Just One Of Those Things, I Didn’t Know What Time It Was

Reviewed By Matthew Anthony Allair

    It has been just over ten years since Billie Holiday tragically passed on from needless misadventures and health issues. By the time of her work in the 1950s, her voice had changed due to wear, mistreatment, and bad circumstances. She didn’t have the same characteristics she held from the 40s until 1947, so she had to work around those issues. She may not have been the same singer as Sarah Vaughn or Ella Fritzgerald, but she dipped into her pathos and capitalized on her idiosyncratic phrases in the later years. Verve and Norman Granz did seem to know how to set up a good space for her work. She could still evoke joy and sadness, but there was always more a tinge of life experience with her later years. The tragedy of Billie’s later years was all too common for African American jazz players of her era. Drugs took many, namely heroin and you had a society where racism and segregation was all too common, it would wear on anybody as the years continued, hence, the use of drugs was the culmination of dead ends for many – talent elevated those out of bad situations, but it didn’t fix core issues.

    This album, with its six songs, saw her at the cusp, there’s a warmth and relaxed feeling with much of the material. Horn players Edison and Webster offered a fine counterpoint to her vocals, and Barney Kessell’s jazz guitar had a enough blues accents within it to hint at the discords. Pianist Jimmy Rowles had a dexterity and taste to respond to her vocal treatments. There’s a playful life to the opener, “Day In, Day Out” which is pleasant and some nice call backs from Kessell and Holiday, Edison has a detached Miles quality with his solo on it. Nice trade off with all of the players. Things are brought down a little with the ballad “A Foggy Day”, Billie is a little detached with the opening, but as the tempo comes to life, there’s a ebullience with her vocal that carries it. Kessell leads the feel with the soloing. “Stars Fell On Alabama” has a distinguished quality to it, and Billie offers an elegant read. 

    The second half offers the same tone of sophisticated ballads, “One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)” had already become a standard favorite for Frank Sinatra, and Billie offers a sad read with a sultry horn solo. Cole Porter’s “Just One of Those Things” has become another favorite of song interpreters. There’s a faster tempo and more dynamism with this arrangement, which builds into one of the more vibrant numbers on the album, “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was”, the album closer, another song about being a little wiser about love, has a nice set of leads, namely Edison and Kessel and the more sultry sax solo. Few realized she would be meeting a tragic end before the decade of the 50s ended. Have female artists learned the lessons of Holiday? Hard to say. New singers like Barbra Streisand and Dionne Warwick may have heeded the past. Marilyn Monroe didn’t survive long into the new decade, Judy Garland has already retired. It’s difficult to know what lessons new rock singers like Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, or “Mama” Cass Elliott from the legacy of a figure like Holiday. It’s easy for female vocalists to become victimized, and more a challenge to overcome those realties.