Next month sees what would have been Billie Holiday’s 100th birthday, and prominent among the tributes are Cassandra Wilson’s Coming Forth By Day (a personal, genre-blending re-examination, out on 10 April), and this more generically faithful interpretation of nine classic Holiday songs from the fine New York vocalist José James. James calls this set a tribute to his “musical mother”, and it partners him with that most constructively supportive of jazz pianists, Jason Moran, and the bass/drums pairing of John Patitucci and Eric Harland. Without striving for big payoffs, James lets the timeless materials of Good Morning Heartache, Body and Soul and Strange Fruit speak for themselves, but his precisely crafted phrasing and occasional improviser’s digressions reinvent this material by the lightest of touches. Moran’s remarkable piano solos are both dramatically independent tributes, and at one with the prevailing mood. James’s silky purr and unsettling calmness bring a scary resignation to Good Morning Heartache; Lover Man emerges over a slow bass vamp and sounds wistful, until the singer unexpectedly fires off “no-one here to LOVE me” as an anguished yelp; and Strange Fruit achingly rises over deep-choral hums and a baleful slow handclap. José James has long sounded like the real deal, and never more so than here.
