Billie Holiday - The Bitter Harvest of Lady Day

“Quando camminava per strada/ era come una bambina che si guarda i piedi/ ma quando passava davanti al bar/ e sentiva la musica/doveva entrare e cantare/ doveva essere così/ …/ E dopo che l’applauso si era spento/ dopo che la gente era andata via/ scendeva dal palco/ e prendeva la porta/ e se ne tornava all’albergo/ che chiamava casa/ muri dipinti di verde/ un cesso nel corridoio”.

It seemed like a good start. To begin with how I first met her, Lady Day, on an unforgettable day when I was fifteen, among the grooves of a live album on which Lou Reed proclaimed himself a "rock'n'roll animal". A friend had lent it to me, I'd stumbled onto the Clash only a few days earlier, and could my life ever be the same again after that? Naturally, I had no idea who that woman was that the guy was singing about, whom I knew just as little about, which is to say nothing at all. Except that the chord change that kicks off Sweet Jane, after the grandiose pomp of an Intro that deliciously has nothing to do with anything else this man ever recorded, before or since, had the effect of an orgasm on me. It was better than an orgasm. It would take me a while to discover that Lou Reed was somebody important (though to me he was already God regardless); that he had been the leader of a band called Velvet Underground; that the tracklist of "Rock'n'Roll Animal" was made up almost entirely of Velvets songs, and that almost was Lady Day. And it would take a while longer still to discover who on earth the aforementioned Lady was: not a character from the narrow, grieving court of miracles of "Berlin", as I believed for some time.

I met Billie Holiday in person years later, and on the printed page before I ever did on vinyl, reading the Italian translation published by Feltrinelli of Lady Sings The Blues, left behind by some blessed soul on a cot in the guardroom of an old arsenal just above Savona. It struck me like lightning and very nearly cost me a punishment for making me late for a shift change. And what a disappointment it was to listen, about a year later and back in civilian clothes, to my first Holiday record and find in it only an infinitesimal fraction of those emotions. Granted, that slapdash ESP double LP was not the best possible introduction to Holiday — one of the worst, in fact — but the fault lay not with the album but with me, since I got nothing out of it. The fact is I knew little about jazz. The fact is that the Lady invented a way of singing jazz, and more than jazz, that has been so widely imitated that anyone listening to her decades later inevitably loses sight of just what a revolution it was. And it's another, decisive fact that I was too young to grasp its innermost essence. Because you can listen to Billie Holiday and perceive her greatness, and even love her, at any age, but to truly understand her, life first has to have worn you down a little. You need to have had your own blues. Then, and only then, will you understand hers.

Yes, a good start. Or I could have quoted another rock star, not Lou Reed but Kurt Cobain. His resigned, furious "here we are now, entertain us" echoed in my memory as I read what Samuel Grafton wrote in 1939, in the pages of the "New York Post", in a sharp and prescient review of Strange Fruit: "It is as if a game of make-believe had ended, and a blues singer who had hitherto hidden her true sorrow behind a string of little love songs had lifted the curtain and shown us what had really been making her cry... It is a work of art incredibly perfect in a performance that reverses the usual relationship between a colored entertainer and her white audience. 'I have been entertaining you,' she seems to say, 'now you just listen to me.' The polite conventions between the races are gone. It is as if we were hearing a shout of anger from the depths of the great forest, now that the cruel night has passed... If ever the blow-torch of the suppressed hatred of the South's Negroes is to fall upon the heads of their oppressors, this song, sung in a sort of gay despair, is its signal."

I have entertained you. Now you just listen to me.

“Gli alberi del Sud producono uno strano frutto,/ sangue sulle foglie e sangue alle radici,/ un corpo nero che ondeggia nella brezza del Sud,/ uno strano frutto che pende dai pioppi./ Una scena pastorale nel valoroso Sud,/ gli occhi sporgenti e la bocca storta,/ profumo di magnolia dolce e fresco,/ e d’improvviso l’odore della carne che brucia./ Qui c’è un frutto che i corvi possono beccare,/ che la pioggia inzuppa, che il vento sfianca,/ che il sole marcisce, che l’albero lascia cadere,/ qui c’è uno strano e amaro raccolto.”

In Holiday's artistic journey, Strange Fruit marks a clean watershed. There is a "before" and an "after", both great but each with a different kind of greatness. It is the peak of an arc. Geometry teaches that after a peak there can only be a descent, but in a strange and dramatic way Billie would manage to descend while ascending, toward empyreans of a beauty both diseased and pure, and absolute. It would be, as the title of a famous essay by Martin Williams puts it, "a triumphant decline". Strange Fruit is the end of innocence, even if it seems odd, almost perverse, to speak of innocence given that we're talking about a life that began the way hers did.

"Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen, and I was three. Mom was working as a maid for a white family, and when they found out she was pregnant they threw her out bodily... Both of them were just kids, and kids grow up fast when they're poor. It's a miracle Mom didn't end up on relief and me in an orphanage. But Sadie Fagan loved me even when I was nothing but a kick in her ribs while she was scrubbing floors. She went to the hospital and made a deal with the woman in charge. She said that to pay for her care and mine, she'd scrub floors for a while, and she'd work as a servant to the other broads who went there to have their babies too. On that Wednesday, April 7, 1915, when I was born in Baltimore, Mom was thirteen."

That's the opening of Lady Sings the Blues, and do you know of another autobiography about music that can boast one just as unforgettable? Come on! Do you know of any other autobiography whose first page is quite so breathtaking? Aside from Charles Mingus's Beneath the Underdog, which in the same way grabs you by the scruff of the neck and never lets go. Which in the same way takes plenty of liberties with the facts, but no matter, because the tall tales it tells are more revealing than any proven truth. One might say, for how they lay a soul bare: truer. Much has been written about a book that Lady Day herself claimed she hadn't even read, lying yet again. The actual author, William Dufty (the "as told to" on the cover being a modest understatement), has never been forgiven by the habitually spiteful jazz critics for being neither a historian nor, still less, a musicologist, but merely a tabloid journalist — the only kind of press, incidentally, ever read by a woman whose relationship with literature never went beyond comic strips and romance novels. But in truth Dufty did a more than good job, superb even, in the way he renders a street-smart vernacular full of coarse but irresistible humor, even when the events recounted are a distillation of tragedies in the making that wouldn't exactly inspire laughter. That was exactly how Holiday spoke, as attested both by those who knew her and by the studio chatter immortalized on various recordings. It almost goes without saying that, since he knew his trade and was well aware that tales of artistic triumph sell fewer books than explorations of existential gutters, it was on the latter that he focused. Still, he did his homework as best he could, drawing on a rich array of articles and interviews and, of course, many in-depth conversations with the Lady herself. It would be foolish to hold against him inaccuracies that are at times glaring (most notoriously the one about Billie Holiday's birthplace, given as Philadelphia rather than Baltimore; and the girl's parents never actually married each other — her mother wed one Phil Gough in 1920), foolish to blame him for the many other "adjustments" that were surely the work of the story's own protagonist. To approach Holiday, her so-called autobiography remains as essential a tool as a well-chosen set of compilations (fair warning: Billie is addictive, and before long you'll move on to the complete box sets) from each of her four main artistic periods. Columbia, then Commodore, Decca and Verve, with a return to Columbia near the end.

And her greatest, most truthful lie, Lady Sings the Blues (which its... author wanted to call A Bitter Crop, but Doubleday wouldn't allow it), is fired off right there in the title. Because, technically speaking, the Lady very rarely sang the blues (hundreds of released sides, and you can count the actual blues numbers on your fingers). And yet she made quintessential blues out of whatever she sang, in a life that was itself a blues, running forty-four years long. It's a detail that sets her apart, if not uniquely so, among the jazz singers who rose to prominence in the first half of the twentieth century.

Another trait that distinguishes her not only from those singers but from almost all the later voices of soul music's golden age is so glaringly obvious that it can slip right past you, and indeed it slipped past me, until I recently picked up the Dufty book again, and with it Luciano Federighi's fine afterword: "There was no gospel in her roots." How true, and how important, that is! I sat there for a moment, mouth agape, and when, in one of the countless articles I read or reread to prepare for writing this piece, I came across someone (I've been frantically digging through my notes without finding either the name or the exact quote: apologies) who argued that what was decisive for Billie Holiday's artistic as well as human character was her not being Christian, I found myself nodding my big head vigorously in agreement.

A few facts, then. Born Eleanora Fagan, with Irish blood in her veins passed down from a great-grandfather, a Virginia landowner who fathered sixteen children with her enslaved great-grandmother, Billie grew up "like a little savage" (Polillo), handed off to one family of friends or relatives after another by a teenage mother who, hard as she worked, couldn't support her with any decency. As for her father, Clarence Holiday, a skilled guitarist who would long play in a renowned orchestra like Fletcher Henderson's, and an unrepentant womanizer (at his funeral the famously quarrelsome Sadie and Fanny Holiday would discover, aghast, the existence of, among others, a white mistress complete with children in tow), his visits were rare. Rather than easing the sense of abandonment that would mark for life a child who, growing up, would never manage to feel loved, they cruelly underscored it. When she was ten, her mother and stepfather split up, and she grew ever more rebellious. She stopped showing up at school, and for that a juvenile court — the long arm of the law slapping her for the first time — found a remedy worse than the ailment, locking her up in a reformatory for a year. Once out, she would return there a few months later as the result of an even more dramatic event and an even more glaring injustice: a neighbor raped her, and incredibly, they both ended up behind bars. When she was released, she said goodbye to Baltimore for good. Sadie had finally called her to come live with her, in New York.

This is one of the most contested points in Lady Day's story. In the Dufty book she says her mother got her a room with a very refined lady, on the understanding that the girl would work for her as a maid, with the naive mother having no idea that the woman in question ran a brothel. More plausibly, other biographers maintain that Sadie herself worked in that brothel, and not exactly doing the washing, ironing, or cooking. Before long the same would be true for her daughter, who, for that matter, had already frequented places of that sort, if perhaps only in passing, at the home of that legend-wreathed Alice Dean, the woman responsible for her love of jazz. It was indeed in her rooms that Eleanora-not-yet-Billie began devouring the records of those who would remain her models, Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith. Epilogue: another arrest (don't bother trying to keep count; I won't list them all, and at a certain point I lost track myself anyway), and it's upon her release from Blackwell's Island, in October 1929, that jazz turned from a passion into a job — the first more or less respectable one for the precocious, voluptuous fourteen-year-old. An audition as a dancer at Pod's & Jerry's, one of the countless clubs crowding 133rd Street ("the real street of swing, the way they later tried to make 52nd Street"), was a disaster of such proportions that the pianist, taking pity on her, asked: "Can't you sing, kid?" Sure enough, she could sing. It was, in any case, anything but a sudden rise to stardom, and for a long time she would still have to work as a waitress too, performing for tips.

I won't get lost in details that would also risk — there are too many conflicting accounts, and their voices often blur together — perpetuating inaccuracies. The fantastic ten-disc box set "The Complete Billie Holiday On Verve", in its so-called two-hundred-twenty-page hardbound booklet, lists something like forty-six titles in its bibliography, and that was back in 1992. If you want to dig deeper into this story, you'll be spoiled for choice. Here I'll simply note that the girl, who had taken the stage name Billie Holiday by combining her father's surname with the first name of an actress she adored, Billie Dove, was discovered — at the Covan, on 132nd Street, where she had replaced Monette Moore after Moore moved on to Broadway — by a very young John Hammond, whose ear was already razor-sharp, twenty-seven years before he discovered a certain Aretha Franklin, twenty-eight before a certain Bob Dylan, thirty-nine before a fellow named Bruce Springsteen. Even her first steps into the record industry were halting, since these were the years of the Great Depression, and plenty of people had no roof over their heads and nothing to eat, let alone money to squander on a luxury item (compare it to today's CD prices: you'll be in for a surprise) like a 78 rpm record.

In November 1933 (no earlier recording survives with pianist Dot Hill, a last-minute replacement for Bobby Henderson, who was not only Billie's accompanist but also her companion, and who had been arrested on the flimsiest of pretexts) the eighteen-year-old cut a couple of sides with Benny Goodman's band that went largely unnoticed. It was, in effect, a false start, worth remembering mainly because - in a coincidence heavy with omen - three days earlier Bessie Smith had recorded in that very same studio what would turn out to be her final songs, and on that same day, of all days, Goodman's boys split their time between Billie and Ethel Waters. Another rather telling influence, despite the outright feud that would later play out between the already-established star and the one on the rise - a fierce mutual dislike at first sight, with the two badmouthing each other for decades to come.

For Holiday, the key year is 1935, and it's also, after an endless string of clubs and theatres, a fortunate convergence of political and economic factors that makes it so. On one hand, Roosevelt's first presidency is slowly beginning to put the country back on its feet after five years of a crisis unlike any seen before; on the other, the end of Prohibition has multiplied the venues offering bookings, meeting people's renewed appetite for fun. Perhaps even more crucial is the jukebox boom, which record labels are desperate to feed. It's certainly not with Art (capital A) in mind that Columbia lets Hammond bring Holiday back into the studio. What's needed are records that ride the trends of the day and cost little to make, assembled like on an assembly line by skilled professionals. Teddy Wilson is a hugely skilled professional (encyclopedias agree in crowning him king of swing pianists), and so are those who surround him. Billie Holiday becomes the voice of the little orchestra. Until roughly the end of '36, the numerous sides that come out bear the name of the popular bandleader printed on the label, then alternating his name with that of the singer, who has landed a separate contract. A few more months and musicians from Count Basie's circle start showing up in the studio, and above all Lester Young, the cursed and fabulous saxophonist and longtime close friend of Holiday's. Close as could be without being lovers, the two of them - he was the one who nicknamed her Lady Day, she the one who christened him President, soon shortened to Pres, and both nicknames would stick. Gathered in the first six volumes of the nine-volume series "The Quintessential Billie Holiday", the recordings from 1935 to 1938 offer a captivating and often hilarious portrait of a talent in tumultuous bloom. Only in hindsight, and reading between the lines, will you find hints of past tragedies and omens of those to come. Center stage - in the words of Bruce Talbot from the liner notes of "Lady Day Swings!", one of the many themed compilations assembled by Columbia in recent years - is occupied by "a young woman who celebrated life and love and created swinging masterpieces out of Tin Pan Alley leftovers, or sometimes, when she was lucky, out of the finest songs by Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, the Gershwins". What a devilish marvel is the breakneck What A Litte Moonlight Can Do, prodigiously redeemed from its own intrinsic, utter banality!

How well it warms the heart, and further down, Easy To Love! If Getting Some Fun Out Of Life is as sly as it is sweet, A Fine Romance combines elegance and feeling with a class and maturity that would seem impossible for a twenty-one-year-old (the recording dates from September 1936) who, a few months later (January 1937), would show her full girlish side on a He Ain't Got Rhythm that makes you want to scream with childlike delight and dance up the walls. Sublimely danceable, joyful and sunny like - to name just a few more, in no particular order - Miss Brown To You, This Year's Kisses, Back In Your Own Backyard, Me Myself And I. While Billie's Blues is already in her repertoire, and the mournful Gloomy Sunday and the autobiographical, heartbreaking God Bless The Child are just around the corner, the future still seems full of promise. Even as, step by step up the ladder of fame, the list grows long (and I'll spare you this one too) of the men who use her and throw her away - so on she goes with alcohol and cigarettes, standard and proper. On she goes with opium: smoking it in 1938 was, believe it or not, the epitome of coolness. Heroin would soon take its place.

"For Billie, Strange Fruit was, artistically speaking, the worst thing that ever happened to her. It was the beginning of the end. She'd become the darling of left-wing intellectuals, and that's when she started taking herself seriously, feeling important… When pop artists start thinking they're making a contribution to art, something happens to them. She became affected, and that's the thing I hate most in pop artists. It never happened to Bessie Smith. She never had that kind of success with white audiences, for one thing… And that was her good fortune."

Ipse dixit John Hammond. I can understand his point of view and even share the underlying thesis, but, respectfully, I beg to differ: Strange Fruit was, artistically speaking, the best thing that ever happened to Holiday. Nor should one counter, in apparent agreement, that it was the worst thing for the human being, whose descent into hell began right there and was, to quote Federighi again, "a harsh and harrowing autumn". Who can reasonably claim that, had she not turned toward Strange Fruit, her life would not have fallen apart anyway? At most that Holiday mystique would have taken a different shape - the one that the Penguin Guide To Jazz by Richard Cook and Brian Morton correctly, if incompletely, locates "in the ambiguity, so hard to distill, between what the words say and what the performer might actually be thinking". That may hold true for much of the rest of the catalogue, perhaps for everything before 1939, but not for a song that could not be more explicit. A melodically threadbare piece, made all the more gripping by the performer's deliberate, almost documentary detachment, relying entirely on the unbearable weight of the words.

"I remember well the first time Red Callender played me a Billie record. It was Strange Fruit. 'What is this, man?' I asked him. Maybe that's partly why they were after her too… She was calling out discrimination, putting it right there on stage… That's when I started to change my mind about songs that tell a story. Music that's here to remind the white world of the racial injustices it's responsible for." (Charles Mingus)

Strange Fruit holds several distinctions. It was the African-American song with which, as Ahmet Ertegun rightly noted, the shift occurred "from coded language to plain speech": "the first cry raised against racism", in Leonard Feather's words, and "like rubbing people's noses in their own shit", in Mal Waldron's. According to Frances Rowan, it was the first time that "a song about the deepest shame of racist America" broke into "the carefree world of jazz". And it was, as Stuart Nicholson writes, "one of the very first popular songs that became impossible to separate from a single, specific recording". And indeed, with the exceptions of Josh White and Nina Simone, for almost half a century no one dared take it on.

The story of Strange Fruit is a story within a story, to which American critic David Margolick devoted an entire, eponymous and masterful book (a good Italian translation exists, published by Arcana) that is revealing in every sense. The song's author - signing it under a pseudonym, Lewis Allan - was not a Black man but a Jewish communist from New York, Abel Meeropol, who wrote both the lyrics, as they've come down to us, and the shaky music, which pianist Sonny White would try to polish up somewhat for the first, historic recording of April 20, 1939. Meeropol, who would do one other extraordinary thing in his life by adopting the orphaned children of the Rosenbergs, murdered by McCarthyist fury, had been inspired to write the song by a photograph that is enough to make anyone's skin crawl - though never as much as Strange Fruit itself. The photo captures, in Marion, Indiana, on August 7, 1930, a crowd of jubilant white people (two girls laughing in the front row) in front of the bodies of two Black men, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, just beaten to death and then hanged from a tree. As Margolick bitterly reminds us, the practice of lynching, south of the Mason-Dixon line but not only there, was widespread from the end of the Civil War and, slowly declining, all the way up to the Second World War. The Tuskegee Institute conservatively counts nearly four thousand lynchings between 1889 and 1940. H.L. Mencken once wrote that in poor small towns they served, in their own favored setting, as a form of popular entertainment: "They took the place of the merry-go-round, the theatre, the symphony orchestra".

Now: Billie Holiday had never had to face racism quite so brutal, but she had faced an equally stupid kind her whole life. Grotesque episodes dot her biography. From the time, touring with Count Basie's orchestra, when she was forced to darken her face with black greasepaint because her skin was light enough that, under the stage lights, she might pass for white, to the opposite case, as the star of Artie Shaw's otherwise all-white band, when she caused a stir and absurd retaliation simply for being Black. She suffered insults in the South, but not only there - Detroit was especially prone to deranged extremism, and even supposedly enlightened New York occasionally dropped its mask: at a hotel that, ironically and mockingly, was called the Lincoln, she was made to enter through the service door and told to use the freight elevator rather than the ones reserved for white guests - she, the show's main attraction. These were, after all, years in which it was the rule that the only African Americans allowed into the clubs where jazz was played were the musicians themselves, plus waiters and kitchen staff. Billie - who was, on top of everything, mixed-race, a woman, and born out of wedlock - knew full well what it meant to be discriminated against, and Strange Fruit touched her to the core, setting off chords that had until then stayed silent in her, aside from her brushes with the law, aside from the outbursts of rebellion and fits of anger she never lacked, aside from the harm she was already beginning to do to herself. But for the artist, as much as for the human being, it was a reckoning that would mark her forever. Needless to say: an act of extraordinary courage that would win her many new admirers but even more enemies. Is it paranoid to suggest that the police persecution that would later use her drug habit as an excuse was in fact triggered by a song that could leave no one indifferent? All it needed was a pretext to explode, and Holiday, unfortunately, handed it one.

In a club that had recently opened in the shadow of the Big Apple, Lady Day finds the ideal setting - indeed the only possible one, since Strange Fruit was hardly standard nightclub fare - for the song's first performance. It's called Café Society, billing itself as "the wrong place for the right people", and - scandalously - it draws a crowd where races and social classes mix freely. Black intellectuals and pimps, university students and elderly liberal Jews. Hanging by its coat label from the ceiling is an effigy of Hitler with ape-like features. Holiday will sing there very often, Strange Fruit always the last song of the set (never an encore afterward), always performed with the whole room coming to a standstill, a single spotlight fixed on her, only the pianist accompanying her. No one who was lucky enough to hear her there, enunciating and quietly hurling words like stones, could ever forget it. Strange Fruit would become a sensation in the city's papers even before it was ever recorded. And nothing would ever be the same again, for Billie or for America as a whole. It's safe to say: no other song, ever, has had such a searing impact on an entire society. It's safe to say: the civil rights struggle that would blaze up in the Sixties, with soul music as its soundtrack, finds here its first forerunner, its first anthem. "A change is gonna come", but Billie wouldn't live long enough to see it.

Hammond, as we've seen, doesn't like Strange Fruit and doesn't want it released on Columbia, yet he does the right thing by allowing the label to temporarily "lend" Holiday to a small independent label. It was founded by a man named Milt Gabler, a passionate jazz lover who ran two record stores in the city. It takes its name from the address of one of those two stores, Commodore, and would be remembered as the first label specializing in the genre, a happy oasis "of musicians, for musicians". Lady Day would record for Commodore on four occasions, in April 1939 and then between March and April 1944, sixteen songs in total. Padded out with a generous twenty-nine alternate takes, this is the program making up a double GRP compact disc from 1997, "The Complete Commodore Recordings". It offers up wonderful things, from a definitive Fine And Mellow, the quintessential non-love song, to an I Gotta Right To Sing The Blues very close in spirit to Satchmo (albeit a rather melancholy Satchmo), from a dreamlike My Old Flame to an I'll Be Seeing You in which one senses the fear of a farewell more than the promise of a reunion (the world is at war), to a hushed He's Funny That Way, swinging and smiling. But Strange Fruit alone would be enough to make this a mandatory presence in any worthy record collection.

The aforementioned Gloomy Sunday and God Bless The Child make the three-year span from 1940 to 1942, which closes out her relationship with Columbia, particularly noteworthy. Their counterpoint is a sparkling, flirtatious Let's Do It: Billie would never again sound so happy on record. Between 1942 and the early months of 1944, Lady Day records nothing in the studio, for the simple reason that no one in the United States is recording anything at all, musicians being locked in a state of permanent labor unrest. When the strike ends, it's Gabler - aware that Commodore is too small to serve her properly - who brings her to Decca. She would stay there six years, scoring her biggest hit right away with Lover Man, with which she could finally fulfill a dream: having had, at Columbia, the support of a fairly generous share of the finest jazz musicians of the day, now she could sing surrounded by a string section. The double album "The Complete Decca Recordings" preserves the most "classy" Billie Holiday, in the best sense of the word, beautifully embodied by a classic like That Ole Devil Called Love, mostly poised between pensive romanticism and the burning bitterness of Don't Explain (the second most memorable of her non-love songs), though occasionally still fizzing with fun. There wasn't much fun left in her life.

In 1945 her mother precedes her into the grave that her daughter would literally join (they are buried together; the headstone reads Sadie, born 1896, raising questions) fourteen years later. In May 1947, possession of narcotics earns her a sentence of one year and a day in prison (the judge estimates her earnings over the previous four years at nearly eight hundred thousand dollars, of which nothing remains). As part of the rehabilitation program at the Federal Women's Reformatory in Alderson, she is made, among other things, to tend a herd of pigs. That's how America treated one of its greatest artists.

In 1952 Billie lands at the label that would become Verve but was still called Clef, run by Norman Granz, who would prove to be her second great Pygmalion after Hammond, though even he couldn't stop what was, in every sense, a long, very long suicide. Billie Holiday never had a great voice in the conventional sense - her range was always modest - the miracle lay in how she used it: in her crystal-clear diction, in the dramatic shadings she could give to the most banal, overused words, which suddenly sounded new and unheard-of in her mouth, in an unsurpassed sense of swing. Bright and childlike at the start (she was, after all, little more than a child), she had grown, over time, deeper and ever more supple. Now smoking and drinking limit her further still, and in the end her voice would be little more than an increasingly unintelligible croak, at times closer to speech than to song. And yet, still a formidably expressive instrument. Hearing it gradually deteriorate across the aforementioned ten-disc set, which lines up, in strict chronological order, something like twelve hours of recordings from 1945 (documenting her participation in the legendary "Jazz At The Philharmonic" concerts) to 1959, the last things committed to tape less than four months before her untimely death, is unspeakably painful. And yet, amid a few even devastating lapses, there are here, and in greater number, also astonishing triumphs, chief among them a concert at Carnegie Hall, on November 10, 1956.

Billie Holiday's spiritual testament - she passed away on July 17, 1959, suffering the final outrage of being arrested on the usual charges on her deathbed and kept under guard in her hospital room - is the controversial "Lady In Satin", recorded in February of the previous year, the fruit of her renewed partnership with Columbia. Arranged with great skill, though certainly not with a light touch, by Ray Ellis, with strings overflowing on every side (set against brass that puffs out little bursts of poetry) and a choir that makes it even more otherworldly, it is the most glorious photograph of a failure ever taken. Ghostly and gorgeous, steeped in an annihilating despair.

"That spark in your eyes is gone,/you're breaking my heart,/you've changed", sings Billie in You've Changed, and it's too much, you can't take it anymore, you rush to take the record off. It startles you to find it clean, not stained with tears and blood.

* First published in “Blow Up”, issue 91, December 2005.

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