Torn From Body and Soul
By JAY COCKS
PERFORMER: BILLIE HOLIDAY
ALBUM: THE COMPLETE BILLIE HOLIDAY ON VERVE 1945-1959
LABEL: VERVE
THE BOTTOM LINE: A boxed set captures, if not the glory days of a supernal jazz singer, great ones nonetheless.
SHE SAID EVERYTHING LIKE SHE meant it, and she sang it as she lived it. "I'm telling you, me and my old voice, it just go up a little bit and come down a little bit," Billie Holiday says during a rehearsal interlude on this landmark set. "It's not legit. I do not got a legitimate voice." True enough. But Billie Holiday changed every notion of legit -- twisted it right around into such a newfangled shape that her silken, serpentine style became the touchstone for all jazz singing. She was, by herself, the new tradition. Others followed, and some were great. But no one has ever touched her.
Her life, a parabola of supreme artistry and self-destruction, was, as she says, up a little bit, then down. Way down. Her last dire days, her body racked with junk and her voice cracked like thawing ice, have been rued and romanticized. When she died in 1959, the superstructure of the legend was already raised: the instinctive jazz talent, full of early genius, snuffed out by racism, callow commercialism and self-indulgence, her best work far behind her.
But Billie Holiday was no butterfly to be broken on such a greasy wheel. As this triumphant 10-CD collection demonstrates, she still had greatness in her. She was leading a reckless life when she laid down her great Columbia sides in the 1930s and early '40s, and by the time she got to Verve, the price she was paying for her excesses was becoming more damaging. You can hear the bills coming due. In a "Jazz at the Philharmonic" session from 1945, Holiday's debut at Carnegie Hall, she follows a sexy, freewheeling Body and Soul with a heart-riving version of Strange Fruit in which her voice cracks on the final note. By 1957, when she appears at the Newport Jazz Festival, her voice is slurred, and she has problems not only keeping up with accompanist Mal Waldron but even catching her breath.
Holiday dwelled and worked, however, on a plane of pure, primal feeling, and by that standard -- on her level -- this package contains peerless music. Like a superb actress, Holiday knew how to internalize her turmoil. She had too much pride in her womanhood, her race and her artistry to turn herself into a sorry paradigm of self-pity. Rather she could make each song she sang a personal testament -- a confession, a regret, a reverie. She did not trade on her personal devastation. She used it till the end, to drive her artistry.
Inevitably, it finally overcame her. This set offers not only a living piece of her life in music but a kind of oral history of the last years as well. Producer Phil Schaap has included 1 1/2 hours of newly discovered material, rehearsals in 1955 where Lady Day runs through some tunes, runs over a little history ("Jesus Christ. Man broke my heart and I needed the loot"), runs down some collaborators ("The dirty bum," she says of her producer, Norman Granz. "I hate that son of a bitch") and in general gives a strong account of the spirit that kept her vital even as her body was giving out.
The rehearsal singing is uncertain, and the speaking voice has a deep, narcotic slur. But there is no ruin in it. Maybe truth can speak with a single voice after all: Billie Holiday's.