Lady in satin

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Lady in satin
Studio album by Billie Holiday & Ray Ellis and His Orchestra

Publication
(s)

1958

Label (s) Columbia Records

Format (s)

LP, CD

Genre (s)

Jazz , traditional pop

Title (number)

12

running time

39:10

occupation
  • Orchestra direction: Ray Ellis

production

Irving Townsend

chronology
All Or Nothing At All
(1958) 		Lady in satin Billie Holiday (With Ray Ellis and His Orchestra)
(1959)

Lady in Satin is an album of jazz - singer Billie Holiday , which at 1958 Columbia Records released. It was their penultimate album and one of the first commercial stereo LPs. The arrangements were made by Claus Ogerman and the recordings were made on February 19, 20 and 21, 1958 in the famous CBS 30th Street Studio in New York City . The producer was Irving Townsend , Fred Plaut acted as sound engineer .

History of origin

For the greater part of the 1950s, Billie Holiday was with the jazz producer Norman Granz and his company Clef Records under contract, which was taken over in 1956 by the newly founded Verve Records . In all of her work for Norman Granz, she was accompanied by small jazz combos , including musicians she had worked with back in the 1930s when she made her first recordings with Teddy Wilson . In the early 1950s there were first discussions about albums with songs by George Gershwin and Jerome Kern . They failed, however, and the albums were eventually realized by Ella Fitzgerald when she signed with Verve. By 1957, Holiday had recorded twelve albums for Granz and was now very dissatisfied, so she decided not to renew her contract.

In October 1957, Billie Holiday turned to Columbia producer Irving Townsend and expressed interest in recording with band leader Ray Ellis, whose album Ellis in Wonderland she had liked. She originally wanted to make an album with bandleader Nelson Riddle after hearing his arrangements for Frank Sinatra , especially for his LP In the Wee Small Hours . After getting to know Ellis' version of For All We Know , she preferred to record with it. When Holiday came to Townsend about the album, he was surprised:

“It would be like Ella Fitzgerald saying she wanted to record with Ray Conniff . But she said she wanted a nice album, something delicate. She said that over and over again. She thought it would be nice. She wasn't interested in a wildly swinging jam session ... She wanted that pillow under her voice. She wanted to be flattered by this kind of sound. "

Townsend contacted Ellis about the album. Ellis, who had heard of Holiday's work in the 1930s and 1940s, was excited about the project and said, "I couldn't believe it ... I didn't know she even noticed me." Townsend arranged a meeting with Holiday and Ellis so they could both sign the deal with Columbia. The company provided an unlimited budget for the album. Each of the orchestral musicians received US $ 60 in advance for the three sessions and US $ 150 per side for Holiday. Townsend then set the recording dates for late February 1958.

Title sequence

A side

  1. I'm a Fool to Want You ( Frank Sinatra , Joel Herron, Jack Wolf) - 3:23
  2. For Heaven's Sake (Elise Bretton, Sherman Edwards , Donald Meyer) - 3:26
  3. You Don't Know What Love Is ( Gene DePaul , Don Raye ) - 3:48
  4. I Get Along Without You Very Well ( Hoagy Carmichael ) - 2:59
  5. For All We Know ( J. Fred Coots , Sam M. Lewis ) - 2:53
  6. Violets for Your Furs ( Tom Adair , Matt Dennis ) - 3:24

B side

  1. You've Changed ( Bill Carey , Carl T. Fischer ) - 3:17
  2. It's Easy to Remember ( Lorenz Hart , Richard Rodgers ) - 4:01
  3. But Beautiful (text Johnny Burke , music Jimmy Van Heusen ) - 4:29
  4. Glad to Be Unhappy (Lorenz Hart, Richard Rodgers) - 4:07
  5. I'll Be Around ( Alec Wilder ) - 3:23
  6. The End of a Love Affair (Edward Redding) - 4:46 ( Mono only )

Contributors

reception

Allmusic's reviewer noted, “This was Billie Holiday's penultimate album that was recorded when her body told her enough was enough. During the sessions with arranger Ray Ellis, she drank vodka straight as if it were tap water. Despite her devastated voice (the melt was long gone), she was still an incredible singer. The feeling and tension that she brings to almost every track make this album one of her finest accomplishments. You've Changed and I Get Along Without You Very Well are top-class performances by the singer who has seen life from the ground up. "

Derek Ansell, who reviewed the expanded new edition in the Jazz Journal , disagrees with many of the commentators. "Although Billie's voice was consistently broken and tense [...], the devastated voice conveys the pain, the sadness, the feeling of lost love, the pain and the jazz feeling of every note of every song." She has not a gram of her emotional impact and lost reach, says the author. “Billie lives the words of every song, painfully but emotionally, and she has excellent support from the sympathetic Ellis Orchestra. It's enlightening to listen carefully to how Billie put everything into interpreting these songs (and she didn't have much left) as the orchestra surrounds her with great dexterity and great orchestral competence. "

AB Spellman ( National Endowment for the Arts ) commented on the album on National Public Radio in 2001 ; he said, “This record has got me down over the years. It wasn't my favorite for a long time, and at first I didn't even like it. Because in many ways this is Billie Holiday at its worst. ”Yet every song on this album demonstrates - and more than any other song, the song You've Changed -“ the power of this record ”. Here you can experience “Billie Holiday really reduced to the minimum. You can hear the arcs as she breaks notes, as she bends even monosyllabic words. You can hear her - the way she speaks, you can hear the freedom, how she handles melodies, how she sings over or behind it. You can hear it better on the earlier records, but what you can't get on the earlier records is this incredible life in music. "

The album was included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Julia Blackburn, With Billie , New York: Vintage 2005, p. 267
  2. ↑ Ibid., P. 268
  3. ^ Review of the album at Allmusic (English). Retrieved December 29, 2019.
  4. ↑ Derek Ansell: Billie Holiday: Lady In Satin. Jazz Journal, September 17, 2019, accessed December 29, 2019 .
  5. ^ AB Spellman in an interview with Murray Horwitz, American Film Institute: Billie Holiday: 'Lady in Satin'. NPR, August 1, 2001, accessed December 29, 2019 .