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Celebrate Billie Holiday’s 100th Birthday with Release of The Centennial Collection – Available March 31, 2015

Legacy Recordings Celebrates Billie Holiday’s 100th Birthday with Release of The Centennial Collection, 20 Essential Lady Day Recordings, on Tuesday, March 31, 2015.

Newly Curated Anthology Brings Together 20 Career-Defining Performances, Originally Released from 1935-1945

New York, NY – February 11, 2015 – Columbia Records/Legacy Recordings is celebrating the 100th birthday of Billie Holiday with the release of The Centennial Collection — a newly curated single disc anthology showcasing 20 of the incomparable American blues and jazz singer/composer’s finest recordings. Billie Holiday: The Centennial Collection will be available on Tuesday, March 31, 2015.

Born Eleanora Fagan on April 7, 1915, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Billie Holiday transformed American pop, jazz and blues music in the 20th century with a highly personal and distinctive vocal style that communicated beyond the truth of her material into the emotional content of every moment she was singing.

One of the premier interpretative singers in the history of recorded sound, Billie Holiday continues to affect the way we hear and feel the human soul in music. An archetypal jazz artist and improviser, Billie Holiday created a profoundly influential body of work that began with her first singles in the early 1930s and continues to move and inspire listeners more than fifty years after her tragic death, at age 44, on July 17, 1959.

The recordings on Billie Holiday: The Centennial Collection represent some of the finest performances recorded by Billie Holiday during the height of her career, from 1935-1945, and showcase the range of her artistry through some of her most successful, and most beloved singles. Recorded and released before Columbia Records introduced the first LP album in 1948, the tracks on The Centennial Collection include several signature songs Billie originally cut (as 78rpm singles) for the Brunswick, Vocalion, OKeh, Commodore and Decca labels during her creative peak.

Discovered singing in a Harlem jazz club in 1933 by mythic A&R man John Hammond, Billie Holiday sang at her first recording session on November 27, 1933, laying down tracks with jazz legends Jack Teagarden, Gene Krupa and Benny Goodman. In 1935, she’d go back into the studio with Goodman, along with Ben Webster and Cozy Cole, under the band leadership of Teddy Wilson. Several of her recordings with Wilson appear on Billie Holiday: The Centennial Collection, which features definitive recordings of “Billie’s Blues,” “God Bless the Child,” “Strange Fruit,” “Gloomy Sunday,” “You Go To My Head,” “Fine and Mellow” and other Billie Holiday essentials.

“I don’t think I’m singing,” Billie Holiday once said of her delivery. “I feel like I’m playing a horn…. What comes out is what I feel.”

Billie Holiday: The Centennial Collection is the perfect introduction to an artist whose music is truly timeless.

 

Billie Holiday: The Centennial Collection – track list

1. What A Little Moonlight Can Do

Teddy Wilson & His Orchestra (Billie Holiday, vocal; Brunswick, 1935)

2. These Foolish Things (Remind Me Of You)

Teddy Wilson & His Orchestra (Billie Holiday, vocal; Brunswick, 1936)

3. Summertime

Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra (Vocalion, 1936)

4. Billie’s Blues

Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra (Vocalion, 1936)

5. I’ve Got My Love To Keep Me Warm

Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra (Vocalion, 1937)

6. Why Was I Born?

Teddy Wilson & His Orchestra (Billie Holiday, vocal; Brunswick, 1937)

7. I Must Have That Man

Teddy Wilson & His Orchestra (Billie Holiday, vocal; Brunswick, 1937)

8. I’ll Get By (As Long As I Have You)

Teddy Wilson & His Orchestra (Billie Holiday, vocal; Brunswick, 1937)

9. Mean To Me

Teddy Wilson & His Orchestra (Billie Holiday, vocal; Brunswick, 1937)

10. When A Women Loves A Man

Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra (Vocalion, 1938)

11. You Go to My Head

Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra (Vocalion, 1938)

12. The Very Thought Of You

Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra (Vocalion, 1938)

13. I Can’t Get Started

Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra (Vocalion, 1938)

14. Them There Eyes

Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra (Vocalion, 1939)

15. All of Me

Billie Holiday, accompanied by Eddie Heywood & His Orchestra (OKeh, 1941)

16. God Bless The Child

Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra (OKeh, 1941)

17. Gloomy Sunday

Billie Holiday, accompanied by Teddy Wilson & His Orchestra (OKeh, 1941)

18. Strange Fruit

Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra (Commodore, 1939)

19. Fine and Mellow

Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra (Commodore, 1939)

20. Lover Man (Oh, Where Can You Be)

Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra (Decca, 1945)

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