Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 20

Record label: Columbia

Produced: Irv Townsend

Recorded: CBS Studios, New York; February 18–20, 1958

Released: Autumn 1958

Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)

Personnel: Billie Holiday (v); with the Ray Ellis Orchestra

Track listing: I’m A Fool To Want You; For Heaven’s Sake; You Don’t Know What Love Is; I Get Along Without You Very Well; For All We Know; Violets For Your Furs; You’ve Changed; It’s Easy To Remember; But Beautiful; Glad To Be Unhappy; I’ll Be Around; The End Of A Love Affair

Running time: 44.32

Current CD: Sony CK65144 adds: I’m A Fool To Want You; The End Of The Affair; Pause Track

Further listening: Billie’s Greatest Hits (1998) – the best of the singer’s US Decca recordings, songs that formed the basis for the Lady Sings The Blues soundtrack, except that these are the originals and far superior to Diana Ross’s interpretations

Further reading: The Life And Times Of Billie Holiday (Donald Clarke, 1995), the most thoroughly researched Lady Day biography; www.cmgww.com/music/holiday/

Download: iTunes

Billie loved the Ray Ellis string sound and played Ray’s Ellis In Wonderland album continuously. After getting together, the duo began selecting the songs for the three-day session, Ellis later observing: ‘I didn’t realise that the titles she was picking at the time were really the story of her life.’ Billie was in poor shape and was about to face a trial for drug possession. The once beautiful woman had become one of the living dead, haggard, stooping, with a voice that cracked and failed to hold notes. Producer Townsend, who’d earlier worked with Mahalia Jackson, admitted: ‘Billie was closer to the end than most stars, but she was Billie Holiday with a style and a voice like no other woman ever had.’

Ray Ellis revealed that the sessions were nothing if not problematic. The singer would turn up completely stoned – in the case of The End Of A Love Affair she professed not to know the song at all. Eventually the backing track for the side had to be recorded without a vocal, Billie adding a top line at a later date. But the juxtaposition of sandpaper on satin worked marvellously well. Though the voice had to be constantly lubricated by tots of gin, and the imperfections were apparent to all, somehow the result was beauty of an inestimable kind, as Billie poured pain over careworn classics like Glad To Be Unhappy and I Get Along Without You Very Well: pure emotion expressed by a voice that virtually disintegrates before your ears.

When the record was released, Holiday-lovers became locked in conflict. Many voiced the opinion that Lady In Satin should never have been released because it was tantamount to recording someone in their death-throes. Others, including one-time Holiday accompanist Jimmy Rowles, felt it was the singer’s greatest achievement, the most revealing album ever made. She would make one more album, again with Ray Ellis. But it would be her last: by July 17, 1959 the legend born Eleanora Fagan was dead.