Billie Holiday was an American jazz musician & singer-songwriter with a career spanning nearly 30 years. Nicknamed "Lady Day," by her friend & music partner Lester Young, Holiday had a seminal influence on jazz music & pop singing. The Billie Holiday Verve CD collection contains a selection her best-loved albums. Songs By Billie Holiday, A Recital By Billie Holiday, Velvet Moods - Songs By Billie Holiday, Lady Sings The Blues & All Or Nothing At All are housed in a hard-case boxset.
John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, Billie Holiday, Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Lightnin' Hopkins, Elmore James, Leadbelly and many others.
The focus of this exciting, if imperfect, CD is a 1973 reunion of Gene "Jug" Ammons and Sonny Stitt, who were responsible for some of the most famous tenor saxophone battles of the 1940s and early '50s. When the two locked horns, it was musical sportsmanship at its finest. Jug and Stitt had a mutual respect for one another, and their battles were the essence of friendly competition.
Recorded between 1950 and 1958, this collection of performances focuses on the twilight years of the legendary jazz and blues singer who, along with Louis Armstrong, redefined the art of interpreting popular song in the first half of the twentieth century. Performance footage of Billie Holiday may admittedly be scant, but this issue compiles into a single release song cuts from some of Holiday's live filmed performances that are still extant.
The focus of this exciting, if imperfect, CD is a 1973 reunion of Gene "Jug" Ammons and Sonny Stitt, who were responsible for some of the most famous tenor saxophone battles of the 1940s and early '50s. When the two locked horns, it was musical sportsmanship at its finest. Jug and Stitt had a mutual respect for one another, and their battles were the essence of friendly competition. Some die-hard beboppers might be disappointed to learn that God Bless Jug and Sonny (which was recorded live in Baltimore in 1973 but went unreleased until 2001) isn't all that competitive - the saxmen don't try to relive their legendary cutting contests of the 1940s and early '50s…
Billie Holiday. The first popular jazz singer to move audiences with the intense, personal feeling of classic blues, Billie Holiday changed the art of American pop vocals forever. More than a half-century after her death, it's difficult to believe that prior to her emergence, jazz and pop singers were tied to the Tin Pan Alley tradition and rarely personalized their songs; only blues singers like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey actually gave the impression they had lived through what they were singing. Billie Holiday's highly stylized reading of this blues tradition revolutionized traditional pop, ripping the decades-long tradition of song plugging in two by refusing to compromise her artistry for either the song or the band…