Rare Live Recordings 1934-1959

 In 1972, thirteen years after her death, Congress extended copyright protections to include recorded musical performances. Holiday would have benefited greatly from such protection: During the more than twenty-five years of her career Holiday gave an unknown number of live performances on TV and radio and in clubs and concert halls, many of which were recorded both officially and unofficially by sound engineers, fellow musicians, and fans. Today ESP-Disk Records, which for many years has been assembling unofficial recordings of several artists from before 1972, has released one of the most comprehensive collections of live Billie Holiday recordings to date, some previously available but most not. These Holiday recordings, laid out in chronological order, not only demonstrate the arc of Holiday’s development as a vocalist but give a rare behind-the-scenes look into how the singer approached her musicians and her audience.

The first disc of this compilation opens with a twenty-year-old Billie Holiday performing with Duke Ellington in 1935, followed by a radio broadcast from the Savoy Hotel in New York City two years later in which Holiday fronts the Count Basie Orchestra, with which she toured during the late 1930s. By the time of these live recordings Holiday had already been singing professionally for several years in Harlem clubs and working with the best musicians on the vanguard of the nascent jazz scene—specifically horn players like Lester Young and Benny Goodman. Holiday had learned her craft from listening to Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith records in her hometown of Baltimore, but no one taught her how to pace her phrases, to alter the melody in such a simple yet unerring way, to charge each word with emotional urgency—these musical gifts were hers.

The next four discs cover Holiday’s career from 1949 to her death in 1959. During those ten years, by which time jazz had taken firm hold in the public consciousness as the language of modernity, advances in radio and TV technology changed the way Americans consumed entertainment, and the mass proliferation of recorded media from that time leaves us with dozens of examples of Holiday’s live performances. Set in the context of other early recorded media presentations it is easy to imagine how revolutionary Holiday’s singing sounded to mainstream American audiences, with her plaintive voice and blues inflections and uncensored delivery.

Included is a portfolio of photographs and performance data detailing a historical timeline of rare radio and television broadcasts, and concert performances, and the events and situations that lead to these powerful performances; along with explanations some of her most popular material, such as Strange Fruit.