"Considered by many to be the greatest jazz vocalist of all time, Billie Holiday lived a tempestuous and difficult life. Her singing expressed an incredible depth of emotion that spoke of hard times and injustice as well as triumph. Though her career was relatively short and often erratic, she left behind a body of work as great as any vocalist before or since." -- PBS.org, "American Masters"

A five-CD compilation of extremely rare live performance recordings from 1935-1959, plus a detailed liner timeline of performance information.

In 1972, thirteen years after her death, Congress extended copyright protections to include recorded musical performances. Billie Holiday would have benefited greatly from such protection: during the more than twenty-five years of her career, Holiday gave an unknown number of live performances on TV & radio and in clubs & concert halls, many of which were recorded both officially and unofficially by sound engineers, fellow musicians, and fans. Today ESP-Disk', which for many years has been assembling unofficial recordings of several artists from before 1972, has released one of the most comprehensive collections of live Billie Holiday recordings to date, some previously available but most not. These recordings, laid out in chronologicalorder, not only demonstrate the arc of Holiday's development as a vocalist but give a rare behind-the-scenes look into how the singer approached her musicians and her audience.

The first disc of this compilation opens with a twenty-year-old Billie Holiday performing with Duke Ellington in 1935, followed by a radio broadcast from the Savoy Hotel in New York two years later in which Holiday fronts the Count Basie Orchestra. The next four discs cover Holiday's career from 1949 to her death in 1959. During those ten years, advancesin radio and TV technology changed the way Americans consumed entertainment, and the mass proliferation of recorded media from that time leaves us with dozens of examples of Holiday's live performances. Set in the context of other early recorded media presentations, it is easy to imagine how revolutionary Holiday's singing sounded to mainstream American audiences, with her plaintive voice, blues inflections, and uncensored delivery.

This magnificent set includes a portfolio of photographs and performance data detailing a historical timeline of rare radio/television broadcasts and concert performances--and the events and situations that lead to these powerful performances--along with explanations of some of her most popular material. The set also includes a rare and private recordingof she and some friends in an impromptu setting, with Holiday singing "My Yiddisha Mamma."