They say experience is everything in the jazz world. And it’s true that Billie Holiday brought a world-weary savvy to her later material, an expert manipulation of vocal conventions helping prolong her popularity in a stage of her career when her voice was ravaged from years of excess and abuse. Yet the music showcased here from 1935 to 1939, the period immediately following her signing to Brunswick Records, is still regarded by many as representing the peak of her output. Discovered by noted record producer John Hammond, who’d go on to unearth such disparate talents as Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, Holiday was teamed with some of the best jazz musicians around, and her use of rhythm and the emotion she put into her performances immediately turned heads. In four short years Billie Holiday would rise from the status of an unknown to one of America’s foremost song stylists. jazz pianist Teddy Wilson, who worked extensively with her at that time, raved about her talent: ‘She could sing for five seconds and her name was written all over the music.’ Born Eleanora Fagan in Baltimore in 1915 to Clarence Holiday (who played guitar with Fletcher Henderson’s band) and Sadie Fagan, Billie spent her childhood cleaning floors in a brothel. This was followed by a drift into the occupation of her early employers. But music would prove her salvation, Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong her first idols: ‘I always wanted Bessie’s big sound and Pops’ feeling,’ she once commented. John Hammond spotted her in 1933 at a club called Covan’s on 132rd Street after she deputised for an indisposed Monette Moore, describing her to British music newspaper Melody Maker as someone ‘incredibly beautiful (who) sings as well as anybody I ever heard.’ Signing to Brunswick opened doors for Holiday to work with some of the best in the business. Her first session for the label found her backed by Benny Goodman on clarinet, while Teddy Wilson manned the piano and Roy Eldridge played trumpet. The Broadway session produced ‘What A Little Moonlight Can Do’ and ‘Miss Brown To You’ and was a statement of intent. Wilson later declared that ‘that session was never, never surpassed; it may have been equalled, but never surpassed.’ Billie’s vocal talents and Wilson’s arrangements combined to turn popular songs like ‘Twenty-Four Hours a Day’ and ‘Yankee Doodle Never Went To Town’ into jazz classics. And the public responded; the single ’I Cried for You’ sold 15,000 copies, a big hit for Brunswick in days when sales of three to four thousand were more than respectable. The death of Billie’s father Clarence preceded her work with Count Basie, another member of the Brunswick stable. It was with his orchestra that she performed with tenor saxophonist Lester Young, a man whose friendship would prove a rare constant in her troubled life. ‘We called my mother “the Duchess”, so he named me “Lady Day” and I called him “Prez” – we were the royal family.’ Billie left the Basie orchestra after an argument with Hammond, but wasn’t out of work for long. In 1938, she became the singer for Artie Shaw’s all-white ensemble. It was groundbreaking at the time, but was destined to be short-lived; audiences and record executives alike objected to a black singer in a white orchestra. Shaw later said, ‘She had her own thumbprint; when she sang something came alive… That’s what jazz is all about.’ The liberal haven of Greenwich Village, New York was Holiday’s next port of call, and its avant-garde Café Society nightspot was where she began to flourish. Still just 23, she would wear gardenias in her hair, developing her own image and stage presence to accompany the voice that had got jazz circles in America talking. The decade following her Brunswick years brought deepening drug addiction and two failed marriages, the death of her beloved mother and a jail term. It wasn’t until Norman Grantz, founder of the Verve label, reunited her with tenor saxophonist Ben Webster, a pre-war mainstay, as well as other top-flight musicians that restored her career in the early Fifties. Billie Holiday’s death, age 44, in July 1959 was widely mourned, but her music has since been championed by many artists who acknowledge her influence. Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross (whose soundtrack to the bio-pic Lady Sings The Blues reached Number 1 on the Billboard pop album chart in 1973) and the late Amy Winehouse are among those who have introduced her music to new generations. Yet the music of her early years still evokes so much more than memories. As one critic put it, ‘In terms of a collected body of work combining both influence and quality of achievement, these recordings are some of the most important in jazz history.’ Lend this comprehensive collection an ear and prepare to be serenaded, seduced and amazed by the incomparable Billie Holiday.