Icon Series: Love Songs - Billie Holiday

As part of the "Love Songs" subcategory of its discount-priced Icon series of compilations, Universal Music Group issues this Billie Holiday CD, collecting 12 tracks from the latter part of her career, originally recorded for Decca (Tracks 1-3, produced by Milt Gabler), Verve (Tracks 4-11, produced by Norman Granz), and MGM (Track 12, produced by Ray Ellis). The Gabler recordings find Holiday fronting a string orchestra; Granz has her record standards by the likes of Arlen, Berlin, and Gershwin before a small jazz ensemble; and Ellis returns her to a string arrangement for a reading of the Frank Sinatra hit "All the Way." Of course, Holiday's voice betrays some wear and tear at this point in her career, more so as the album goes on, but she makes up for it with her idiosyncratic phrasing and surprising note choices, and the backings, whether orchestral or jazzy, are sympathetic. Most of the songs Holiday recorded in her career could be described as "love songs," so this is really just a sampler of her later years, but a reasonable one. ~ William Ruhlmann, Rovi