Billie Holiday - The Rarest Billie Holiday: Broadcast Performance 1946-1958 (1979 Japanese ESP-Disk' Vinyl LP)

Vinyl: VG+
Sleeve: VG+
Obi: None

Our grading system explained here.
Photo is of the actual item.

Billie Holiday - The Rarest Billie Holiday: Broadcast Performance 1946-1958 | Vinyl LP Mono - 1979 Japanese ESP-Disk' (RJ-7488, Nippon Phonogram)

The "Fine And Mellow" performance alone justifies this album's existence. The CBS television broadcast on December 8, 1957 put Holiday in a room with Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Roy Eldridge, Doc Cheatham, Vic Dickenson, Gerry Mulligan, Mal Waldron, Danny Barker, Milt Hinton and Osie Johnson. Holiday sings the blues she had first recorded twenty years earlier, and Young plays a solo so quiet and exposed it has been written about more than almost any other passage in jazz. Both of them would be dead within two years. The 9-minute performance that closes side A of this compilation captures the full piece. Working backwards through the album, the earliest recording is "Farewell To Storyville" with Louis Armstrong's group (Barney Bigard, Kid Ory, Zutty Singleton), a New Orleans-styled performance from 1946 that catches Holiday in a setting she rarely recorded in. "The Man I Love" is a duo with Teddy Wilson, her most important early collaborator. "God Bless The Child" places her in front of Count Basie's band with Clark Terry on trumpet, Buddy DeFranco on clarinet and Wardell Gray on tenor. "Keeps On A' Rainin'" and "All Of Me" feature Hot Lips Page and Horace Henderson in a smaller group.

Side B opens with "Billie's Blues" and "What A Little Moonlight Can Do" from her working trio of the mid-1950s (Carl Drinkard on piano, Red Mitchell on bass, Elaine Leighton on drums). "Foolin' Myself" has Mal Waldron on piano and Philly Joe Jones on drums, catching Holiday accompanied by musicians more associated with the hard bop generation. "You Better Go Now" and "Them There Eyes" close the album with Percy Faith's orchestra, a pop-orchestral setting that shows the breadth of contexts Holiday performed in during her final years. The audio quality varies across the 14 tracks, as broadcast recordings from this era inevitably do, but the performances are consistently strong and several are not available on any other release. This is the 1979 Japanese pressing on ESP-Disk' RJ-7488, manufactured by Nippon Phonogram Co., Ltd.