A sublime set of performances and a touchstone for the expressive possibilities of vulnerability and understatement.
A late-career high point, Songs for Distingué Lovers captures Billie Holiday in her final years, working within a stripped-back studio setting that placed her voice at the centre of the recordings. Released by Verve in 1957 (and produced by the label's founder Norman Granz), the album presents a carefully chosen set of standards delivered with graceful understatement. Although her voice had diminished greatly by this point, she was still able to put so much feeling into the performances. The small group band are a major asset - trumpeter Harry “Sweets” Edison, tenor saxophonist Ben Webster, pianist Jimmie Rowles, guitarist Barney Kessel, bassist Red Mitchell, and Alvin Stoller or Larry Bunker on drums - showing such restraint and doing much of the heavy lifting where Holiday would have - in earlier years - gladly shown wild flourish.
By the mid-1950s, Billie Holiday was a revered but fragile figure in American music. Having reshaped jazz singing in the 1930s and 1940s, her later years were marked by ill health, addiction and financial destitution. Despite this, she remained an unmatched song interpreter, finding unparalleled reflective nuance in the slower tempos and sparser arrangements.
“Writing a liner note about Billie Holiday can, curiously, be the most effortless thing in the world, and at the same time the most difficult; effortless because the adjectives of praise come easily when describing Miss Holiday's talents, but nonetheless difficult because you're apt to find yourself saying what's been said time and again in other albums”
- Norman Granz
I suppose it's a slightly odd choice to have chosen this album to highlight Billie Holiday as a Sunday Classic album, when, by the time it was recorded, she had lost so much of the vocal zeal that had made her one of the most famous voices in the world in the previous decades. But there is something quite remarkable captured in these sessions. The sorrow, the honesty and the gorgeous melancholy transcend the beauty and dexterity of her younger performances. Songs for Distingué Lovers is heartbreaking, but it is beautiful.
“Oh, just one more note before we stop. We kind of threw in the "distingué" because it had a nice ring to it; actually these songs apply to all lovers.”
- Norman Granz