The sticker on the package says, "The most important recordings by the greatest female vocalist of all time . . . " And who's going to quibble, especially if that means knocking Billie Holiday? Here, after all, was not merely a "singer" but one of the great progenitors. She was Louis Armstrong's greatest acolyte as vocalist and maybe as instrumentalist also, if you consider the human voice on a par with other tools of the musician's trade. Match the formal inventiveness of Armstrong with the intimate sound of a Lester Young or Miles Davis and there's Billie. Unlike Pres or Miles, she could use words as an expressive tool. And unlike Armstrong, she had a beautiful vocal instrument. "She doesn't need any horns," said Miles, "she sounds like one anyway." How many jazz and pop musicians of all stripes has she influenced? The CD booklet for Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday Recordings on Columbia 1933-1944 includes tributes by everyone from Tony Bennett and Sonny Rollins to Elvis Costello, Marianne Faithfull, and Chaka Khan. "Greatest female vocalist of all time"? Why not? When you're discussing a realm that includes Billie, Bessie Smith, and Maria Callas, hierarchies become ridiculous anyway. So let the marketing guys have their day.

They've certainly had their way in terms of packaging. Ignoring the standards for retail, which now demand that box sets conform to the height and width of the standard jewel case (5x5-1/2), or even the old 12-inch LP size, Columbia/Legacy has gone with a 12x10-1/2 design that conforms more to the packaging for the old 10-inch 78s that Holiday recorded during these years. A fake-lizard-skin veneer, deco lettering, and a dark-hued purplish duotone photo of Lady Day complete the 10-CD package (it lists for $169.98). I'm not especially confident about the binding of the 116-page full-size paperbound booklet (with notes by Gary Giddins and producer Michael Brooks), and the "romantic" chiaroscuro effect of some photos tends toward muddiness. (When it comes to packaging, I stick by the fuddy-duddies at mail-order house Mosaic, with its eminently practical 12-inch format and stapled-binding glossy-finish booklets and deep-resolution black-and-white photography.) Still, the Holiday package holds its own as a coffee-table object, and if nothing else, the package is "complete." The set spans 230 tracks, with 35 of them "available for the first time in the US." Columbia has reissued its Holiday holdings multiple times in vinyl and multi-CD boxes, but this is the first presentation of the whole shmeer in one set.

What kind of Holiday do the Columbia years represent? They extend from the precocious 19-year-old who cut the novelty tune "Your Mother's Son-in-Law" with Benny Goodman in 1933 to the "mature" woman in her mid 20s who recorded indelible torch classics like the Gershwins' "The Man I Love," Ellington's "Solitude," and her own "God Bless the Child" and beyond (Holiday died in 1959 at 44). Not here is the career-making saga of a Southern lynching, "Strange Fruit" (recorded for Milt Gabler's Commodore label in 1939). And though there's a torchy element, you won't find the bare ruined choirs of her later recordings. For some Holiday aficionados, the later recordings are the preferred sides, where she wasn't merely a jazz or big-band singer but a chanteuse -- a cabaret star, a "character," for whom the performance of a song was inseparable from the biography of rape, prostitution, and drug addiction. The voice, never capable of much more in its range than an octave, was now a wreck, and Holiday had only a lifetime of musical and personal experience to rely on. Some critics have also quibbled that by the time of those later performances, Holiday's idiosyncrasies had hardened into mannerism, but you won't find me complaining about incomparable turns like the 1957 version of a Ben Webster-accompanied "Love Is Here To Stay," the singer's voice dripping with sarcasm.

Which brings up another point often made about the early Columbia sides -- that despite the occasional gems, the songs weren't very good. In later years, producer Norman Granz set Billie up with choice "American Songbook" material, as he did Ella Fitzgerald. During the Columbia years, she was stuck with the likes of "Your Mother's Son-in-Law" and "Yankee Doodle Never Went to Town." In the liner notes, Brooks (who's been around long enough to know Tin Pan Alley inside out) doesn't spare the material. "[At] this time the music industry was run by the music publishers, and just about every recording artist, black or white, was forced to churn out more than their fair share of junk." But no less an authority than composer/critic/historian/educator Gunther Schuller has asked, "Can one maintain, against all evidence, that these songs, words or music or both, failed to inspire Billie Holiday and her musicians?" In short, how bad could they be?

I'd agree with Schuller on that score. It's not that you can't tell the difference when Holiday gets to the Gershwins' "Summertime," but consider that one of her greatest performances of any era was the apparent trifle "What a Little Moonlight Can Do" (from her second session, in 1935 with pianist Teddy Wilson, a tune Brooks dismisses as "dogmeat" while conceding the stunning results). Holiday was invariably faithful to her texts, but her interpretations could vary. Improvising on the melody, playing with the beat, she could, like Armstrong, desentimentalize a song by making it swing ("Mean to Me"). And there were times, as on that 1957 "Love Is Here To Stay," where the rises and dips in intonation, the infinite varieties of coloring she could give a word, the pause and release of phrasing, could convey the exact opposite of a text's literal meaning. At times that soaring horn of a voice took off into pure abstraction, delivering a text to which it was indifferent except as a collection of vowels. From that first, "Ooo-wooo-wooo what a little moonlight can do," Holiday phrases slightly behind the breakneck tempo, then rushes ahead to catch up, then falls behind again, using the mix of syllable-crammed measures and spare whole notes ("I love you") to create a mischievous, sexy tension that's pure joy.

That's another link with Armstrong in these early sides -- the pleasure principle. Working with one all-star cast after another drawn by producer John Hammond from the Goodman, Basie, and Ellington bands, among others, Holiday for the most part is having a ball. The sessions proceed in four-song sets, the goal being to produce two 78s in a day. The first sessions are billed under the names of "Teddy Wilson and his Orchestra" or "Benny Goodman and his Orchestra," though it was rarely more than seven men backing up Holiday, not the standard "16 men swinging" (that comes in some of the later sides). On these dates, the band play an introductory chorus or two, with solos for, say, Goodman and trumpeter Roy Eldridge, before Billie takes her one chorus and then a Ben Webster takes it out. On later tracks, those tagged as "Billie Holiday and her Orchestra," Billie comes in early and, after a couple of instrumental solos, gets a second chorus.

This is where all the great interplay comes in: Johnny Hodges playing alto on the introduction of "You Let Me Down" and then following Billie's chorus with a trenchant solo; Cootie Williams playing quiet, growling plunger-mute obbligatos behind Billie on "Moanin' Low"; Buck Clayton following Billie on the bridge of "When a Woman Loves a Man" before she takes her second chorus. And on track after track, Lester Young. It's become a cliché to talk about Billie and Pres, but the chemistry is still worth reiterating. After a couple of CDs worth of other estimable saxophonists (Webster, Hodges, Chu Berry, Harry Carney), Young enters on "This Year's Kisses" and transforms the landscape, his melancholy, floating tone the perfect complement to Billie's.

And that's the final deal maker in the set: that Billie sound. It's a reedy head tone, almost nasal, honey-dipped with a glaze of Southern inflection. Combined with her time and attack, it's one reason Holiday could wring more expressive power out of her single-octave range than most singers could get out of four. Listen to the way she hits the opening line of "I'll Get By" ("I'll get by as long as I have you") on a single plaintive note until her voice drops on those last two words. She loved to leap up and hang a note on a huge vowel sound. On "Don't Know If I'm Comin' or Goin'," she follows Buster Bailey's clarinet solo with the bridge "When I found you, I found Heaven right before my door," and the sky opens on that "found." Conversely, the attack-and-release of the single note on the three syllables of the title of "No Regrets" turns into a jaunty, defiant hook. The bloom is on Holiday's voice throughout these sides.

For those who can't afford the lavish "complete" Columbia set, the Ken Burns "definitive" volume will do. And you can buy single-disc installments on Columbia, Verve, and Commodore. The problem is, it's hard not to want all of her.

Issue Date: October 5 - 11, 2001