Last Tuesday would have been Billie Holiday’s 100th birthday, and this soberly handsome set of four CDs, complete with notes and pictures, arrives in the nick of time to mark the occasion. This is Holiday in her 20s, between 1935 and 1942, when her recording sessions were easy-going affairs with a handful of the best jazz musicians – Lester Young, Benny Goodman and Teddy Wilson. The sheer unstudied elegance of her singing captivated them all. As her fame grew and life became a nightmare of drugs, exploitation and abuse, she looked back on this as a golden time. And it was.
