Billie Holiday - The Greatest Interpretations Of Billie Holiday: Complete Edition (1979 Japanese Commodore Vinyl LP Mono)

Billie Holiday - The Greatest Interpretations Of Billie Holiday: Complete Edition | Vinyl LP Mono - 1979 Japanese Commodore (K23P-6611, King Record Co. Ltd)

"Strange Fruit" exists because Columbia would not record it. Abel Meeropol's anti-lynching poem, set to music and sung nightly at Café Society, was judged too dangerous by Holiday's own label, and Gabler's independent Commodore took it on with a one-session release from her contract. Meerapol was a schoolteacher in the Bronx who wrote under the name Lewis Allan, and he wrote the poem after seeing a photograph of a lynching in Indiana in 1930. Holiday had been performing the song at Café Society, New York's first integrated nightclub, closing every set with it and having the lights brought down so that nothing could follow. When she took it to Columbia, the label refused. They were worried about southern retailers and about their radio affiliates, and John Hammond, her own producer, would not do it either. So she went to Milt Gabler, who ran the Commodore Music Shop on 52nd Street and had started a label out of the jam sessions he was recording there. Columbia granted a single-session exemption. On 20 April 1939, two weeks after her twenty-fourth birthday, Holiday recorded four titles with Frankie Newton's eight-piece band. Gabler worried the song was too short and asked Sonny White to improvise a piano passage after Newton's muted trumpet introduction, which is why Holiday does not enter until seventy seconds in. Backed with "Fine and Mellow," it became the biggest-selling record she ever made.

The remaining twelve tracks come from three sessions in the spring of 1944, when Holiday returned to Gabler before signing with Decca. Eddie Heywood plays piano throughout and led the orchestra on most of them, with Doc Cheatham on trumpet, Vic Dickenson on trombone, Lem Davis on alto, John Simmons on bass and Sid Catlett on drums. Freddie Webster, the trumpeter who would shape Miles Davis's early thinking before dying at 30, appears on "She's Funny That Way." The last three titles are cut back to the Heywood trio. Critical opinion on these sessions has always been divided, and Heywood's arrangements have their detractors, but Holiday's singing across "My Old Flame," "I'll Be Seeing You," "I Cover the Waterfront" and "I Love My Man" is as good as anything she recorded in the 1940s. What the album offers, uniquely, is both Commodore periods in one place: the twenty-four-year-old who had just made the most confronting record in American popular music, and the singer of twenty-nine who had learned what to do with a ballad.

This is the 1979 Japanese mono pressing on Commodore K23P-6611, manufactured by King Record Co. Ltd.