Billie Holiday Body and Soul
Label: Verve
Original Released : 1957
Format: [email protected]
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. She made clear her debts to Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong (in her autobiography she admitted, "I always wanted Bessie's big sound and Pops' feeling"), but in truth her style was virtually her own, quite a shock in an age of interchangeable crooners and band singers.
Tracklist:
1. Body And Soul (6:23)
2. They Can't Take That Away From Me (4:12)
3. Darn That Dream (6:19)
4. Let's Call The Whole Thing Off (3:26)
5. Comes Love (4:02)
6. Gee, Baby, Ain't I Good To You (5:38 )
7. Embraceable You (6:50)
8. Moonlight In Vermont (3:48 )
Personnel
Billie Holiday – vocals
Ben Webster - Tenor Sax
Barney Kessel - Guitar
Harry "Sweets" Edison - Trumpet
Jimmy Rowles - Piano
Red Mitchell - Bass
Larry Bunker - Drums
