How I want to love this CD! I’m a huge Billie Holiday fan—I consider her to be the premier voice of a generation, and one of the best vocalists ever. Though others might have run scales around her with greater technical skill, no one can compare to the emotion she evokes, how she can string a few notes together to leave your heart sawn asunder. And I have really enjoyed a lot of the contemporary music that has borrowed the sounds of yesteryear—from US3’s take on Herbie Hancock’s Cantaloupe Island to Moby’s brilliant album Play, to many of the cuts on the Verved Remixed series, this can be done so well, bringing the best of both past and present together to really compliment one another.
Overall however, unfortunately this doesn’t work for me on several levels. Actually the first time I listened to the disc I thought it was a complete disaster. Every song seemed to fail in blending the original tune with its modern accompaniment into anything cohesive, with the result that it just sounded like two different stereos playing, or worse, butcher Billie Holiday into meaningless snippets.
I listened two more times without trying to think about anything too much. While I’m still disappointed for the most part, some of the songs that had immediately put me off at first I warmed up to, and I found some lovely new music in its own right.
The opener “I Hear Music” is close to the 1940 version, keeps a good portion of Billie Holiday’s vocal parts intact from both verse and chorus and retains a lot of the original horn parts. The piano and trumpet parts that were added fit the music and flavor of the song as well. “More Than You Know” starts beautifully with an unadorned Holiday verse, then morphs into a more of a rap/scratch/acid jazz track. The new muted trumpet laid down is the star here, and is one of the standouts on the record. The added bass is great here, too. This would be fine, but Billie Holiday now is featured only as a sentence here and there. And that situation gets worse. A minute before the end of the song there is a break in the tone and Holiday is reduced to a meaningless word repeated over and over. What’s the focus of this record again?
“Spreadin’ Rhythm Around” features Lady Day Mecca from Digable Planets and is true to that group’s style, incorporating plenty of the 1935 recording into a cool, chill, carefree new creation. The music on “Long Gone Blues” is beautiful, Holiday’s vocals mixed skillfully into a lush and spacey soundscape, and the remixers have created a hooky Moby-style chorus. The issue on this song is the treatment of the lyrics—they are very troubled and dark, and I don’t know if they fit the instrumentation at all. The effect is almost creepy. I catch myself thinking, “What did she just say?” On the other hand maybe that’s why they did it. The vocals on “Billie’s Blues” have the same issue, but I think the effect there is even more incongruous, as if the lyrics weren’t even taken into account.
“He Ain’t Got Rhythm” is one of those tunes that completely changes the original’s flavor by turning into a latin jazz number. There is some great new timbale work, but to me this is more of a new composition that features Billie Holiday samples. I still think that can be said for a few of the other tracks—they are cool songs but reach the point where the have nothing to do with the original.
One highlight of the record for me is track 7, “Summertime,” one of Holiday’s most beloved hits. The treatment is almost perfect, retaining the bittersweet vocals and horn parts then blending it gradually in and out of minimal atmospheric keyboards. To me it feels like the new composition was written to truly accompany the original, which is something I had looked forward more to overall. The following song “I’m Gonna Lock My Heart (And Throw Away the Key)” shares in its formula and success and actually is my favorite of the album. The new composition totally compliments Holiday’s vocal line and actually brings out more of its beauty and sadness. I didn’t know this song before, and it really took my by surprise.
Two other famous tunes achieve mixed results. The music for “Pennies From Heaven” and “All Of Me” matches the happy tone of the originals, but both chop Billie Holiday down into a sentence and couple words here and there. Perhaps this wouldn’t even warrant comment if the songs appeared on their respective remixers’ albums or another compilation that wasn’t billed as this great homage to Billie Holiday. Listen to the record on iTunes and download your favorites.
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