Billie Holiday At Storyville CD

Personnel: Billie Holiday (vocals); Stan Getz (tenor saxophone); Buster Harding, Carl Drinkard (piano); John Fields, Jimmy Woode (bass); Marquis Foster, Peter Littman (drums).
Recorded live at The Storyville Club, Boston, Massachusetts in October 1951 and October 1953. Includes liner notes by Alun Morgan.
All tracks have been digitally remastered.
Billie Holiday is in generally good form for this club appearance. On most of the selections she is accompanied by the Carl Drinkard Trio but six others find her joined by Buster Harding's Trio; the great tenor Stan Getz sits in on three of these numbers, making one wish that he and Lady Day had collaborated more extensively. This set of standards (most of which had been recorded previously by Holiday) are not up to the quality of her Decca output but are enjoyable nevertheless. ~ Scott Yanow
This 24-bit remastering of the tapes (taken originally from radio broadcasts) of Holiday's performance at Boston's famous Storyville Club (recorded in '51 and '53 respectively) vastly improves on the originals. The sound quality of the previous versions highlighted vocals and piano but left the rhythm section almost indiscernible. Such is not the case here, and the disc finds Holiday in supremely relaxed, well-weathered voice.
By the early '50s, Holiday's tone and timbre were already markedly different from her light, sensitive approach of the '40s. Deeper, richer, and more heavily stylized, her delivery here is gorgeously drowsy, an aesthetic heightened by the intimate setting and feel of the live nightclub to the point where both Lady and the combo border on the seductive consistency of molasses. Such classics as "Willow Weep For Me" and the marvelously expressive "I Love You, Porgy" are interspersed with the lovely "I Cover The Waterfront" and Holiday's self-penned "Billie's Blues." Particularly notable are the guest appearances by Stan Getz, who joins Holiday on "Lover Come Back To Me" and the unsettlingly confessional "Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do." This is an excellent improvement on an already delightful collection of performances.