Lady Sings the Blues

This album is Mastered for iTunes. An artist is lucky if she or he has a signature song or two that no one else can really touch—think Tony Bennett and “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” or Ella Fitzgerald and “A-Tisket, A-Tasket”. What’s apparent when listening to Billie Holiday’s Lady Sings the Blues is how many songs the pioneering blues-steeped jazz vocalist owned in her shortened career. Recorded between 1955 and 1956, this collection alone boasts the title track, plus wiser revisits of classics such as “Strange Fruit”, “Good Morning Heartache” and her own “God Bless the Child”, which she co-wrote with Arthur Herzog Jr. There’s a sense of hard-earned authority to these tracks, which were captured a few years before her death, particularly the standards “Willow Weep for Me”, “I Thought About You” and a heavily orchestrated version of “I Must Have That Man!”