The Napster Blog

Billie Holiday, The Complete Commodore & Decca Masters

What a truly excellent compilation! The Complete Commodore & Decca Masters covers Billie Holiday's recordings from the late 1930s to the late 1940s and includes some of her biggest hits and best-known songs. "Strange Fruit" is here, as are "Fine and Mellow," "Billie's Blues," "What Is This Thing Called Love," "God Bless the Child," and so many other incredible cuts.

Prior to recording for Commodore Records, Holiday was a Columbia artist. Columbia's unease over "Strange Fruit" led Holiday to jump to Commodore (and then to Decca, through Commodore owner Milt Gabler's connection with that label). Holiday's last years were spent recording for Verve; thus The Complete Commodore & Decca Masters represents her mid-period recordings.

The magnitude of Holiday's artistry and her contribution to music (and culture in general) is difficult to quantify. She changed everything. Her voice was unlike any that had come before her and cut the template for generations of jazz, blues, pop, and rock singers to come. The Complete Commodore & Decca Masters contains some of the best music ever recorded and is, plain and simple, essential listening.

John Coltrane, Side Steps

The latest in a series of collections that includes Fearless Leader and Interplay, Side Steps presents the mid-'50s John Coltrane when he was primarily a sideman featured in groups led by an honor roll of hard bop luminaries including Sonny Rollins, Tadd Dameron, and Gene Ammons, and with bandmates such as Hank Mobley and Jackie McLean. The tunes are arranged in chronological session order rather than by original release date, which helps to highlight Coltrane's maturation process on the tenor sax from 1955-1957. Use your Napster subscription to queue up all three sets to experience a compelling and complete picture of Coltrane's formative years at Prestige Records, on the cusp of his later technical and conceptual breakthroughs.

Mal Waldron, One Entrance, Many Exits

Once an accompanist for Billie Holliday, as well as collaborator with Charles Mingus (who gets a nod on this album with the track "Chazz Jazz"), Mal Waldron played with many of the more forward-thinking figures in jazz, including Eric Dolphy, Archie Shepp, and Steve Lacy. Waldron always straddled a line between his bop roots and the avant-garde, and on One Entrance, Many Exits from 1982—which featured tenor sax great Joe Henderson, drummer Billy Higgins, and bassist David Friesen—both schools of jazz are represented. The standard "How Deep Is the Ocean" sits alongside Waldron originals like the title track, which demonstrates his more angular style.

Barbra Streisand, Love Is the Answer

We recently noted the imminent arrival of this beautiful new album of standards by the one and only Barbra Streisand, with her tantalizingly nuanced interpretation of "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning" as our point of departure. Well, here it is—one of the first true superstar releases of the upcoming holiday season, and as we've already said, it's a gorgeous affair, impeccably produced by Diana Krall and Tommy LiPuma and showcasing Streisand at her subtle best. And here's a little twist that makes it even better: There are two versions of the album available on Napster: The standard 13-track edition (including bonus track "You Must Believe in Spring") and the deluxe edition, which includes the whole original album, including Johnny Mandel's fine orchestra arrangements, and a second, pared-down version with just Streisand and quartet. Both are truly wonderful, but listeners are likely to be wowed by how extraordinarily intimate the quartet versions sound. It's striking. ("Turn up the quiet," Columbia A&R man Jay Landers writes, not hyperbolically, in his album notes.) And that intimacy, it turns out, appears not to have been the product of recording precision alone, as both Krall and Streisand reveal a bit about their creative bond in their own notes: "Finally, during those brief interludes in which technical mysteries must be solved," Krall writes, "we play a few hands of gin rummy on a small table in the control room, just two women, sharing a joke and waiting to go back to work." Writes Streisand, "Diana is a wonderful recording artist...I appreciate that she took the time from her own touring schedule to work with me on this album. She's also a pretty good card player!" Lucky for us they both played their cards so right.

Hugo Montenegro, Bongos & Brass

This 1960 album of stereo-rific instrumental jazz arrangements, focused mainly (as the name leads us to believe) on the upper-pitched percussion of bongos and a spectrum of sounds from various brass instruments, is an early project of Hugo Montenegro, a New York-born composer and arranger who first made his mark working for Andre Kostelantetz and Harry Belafonte, then went on to score movies in Hollywood and to release a string of albums re-interpreting movie music, especially that of Ennio Morricone for Sergio Leone westerns such as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. But this early album is a prize all its own, spreading the sound out generously between the left and right channels and putting some very nice writing and playing on display in the process. The song selection includes standards such as "Laura" and "Lover," and a couple of Ellington numbers in "Cottontail" and "Take the 'A' Train," but it's Montenegro's arrangement of "In the Hall of the Mountain King" that has proved a favorite of Space-Age pop aficionados. Among the small army of percussionists on the album is said to be one Johnny Pacheco on bongos, not long before he led the pachanga craze and established Fania Records (with partner Jerry Masucci) and the legendary Fania All-Stars.

Miles Davis, Bitches Brew

Miles Davis made a career out of shifting gears. His most radical veer from jazz tradition came in the late ’60s and early ’70s when, under the intoxicating influence of such pop/rock/soul artists as Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, and Sly Stone, Davis ushered in the age of fusion, a steamy electric concoction of bubbling funk, explosive rock, and abrasive jazz. The music ruffled the feathers of jazz purists who were unwilling to accept Davis’ vision for the ever-evolving jazz genre, and while Davis was causing the biggest schism in the jazz world since bebop challenged swing in the ’40s, rock fans were blown away. His 1969 fusion masterwork, Bitches Brew, sold over 400,000 copies in a year, making it the biggest-selling jazz album in history.

Willie Nelson, American Classic

What a curious, remarkable, and wonderful thing is the career of Willie Nelson. The man is uniquely unfettered by convention and is an exacting, praiseworthy individualist. He does just what he wants to do and is an uncontested national treasure. The title of his latest album, American Classic, may refer to the material that Nelson chooses to cover on the album, but, unmistakably, it also refers to the man himself.

In 1978, Nelson issued Stardust, a collection of American jazz standards. The album was expected to deal Nelson's career a crippling blow, just as he was riding high on a string of hit country albums following his breakthrough release, 1975's Red Headed Stranger. Defying expectations, Stardust turned out to be the biggest-selling record Nelson ever recorded.

Thirty-one years later, American Classic is a proper successor to Stardust and returns to the latter's format in spectacular fashion. Nelson's voice, like the man himself, is now 70-something, and his vocals are amazingly endearing and display more character and depth than at any time in his career. Add to that a flawless instrumental accompaniment, and the result is enchanting. Guest vocalists, which include Norah Jones and Diana Krall, are a welcome addition, but are ultimately unnecessary. Nelson himself is more than enough to carry this simply fantastic record.

Sonny Rollins, Saxophone Colossus

Sonny Rollins is one of the pillars of modern jazz, a be-bop-trained legend who extended the lineage of tenor sax giants Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young by unifying their disparate styles into an unmistakable, contemporary sound. Saxophone Colossus was recorded in 1956, after Rollins, still in his mid-twenties, had already established his reputation through work with Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell and many others. The album features Max Roach on drums, Tommy Flanagan on piano, and Doug Watkins on bass, and contains five classic tracks, including "St. Thomas," that each illustrate a different facet of Rollins' genius.

James "Blood" Ulmer, Odyssey

Released in 1984, Odyssey perfectly encapsulated guitarist James "Blood" Ulmer's influences up to that point. He is probably the most well-known proponent of Ornette Coleman's harmolodic theory of music besides the saxophonist himself, but Jimi Hendrix, the downtown New York No Wave scene, late '60s funk, and country blues are all present in his playing and singing as well. Ulmer recorded frequently with members of the World Saxophone Quartet and with Ronald Shannon Jackson, but this album was his first with the trio composed of Warren Benbow on drums and Charles Burnham on electric violin.

Anne Walsh, Pretty World

Here's a nice one: Twelve tracks of easygoing, string-enrobed bossa nova, balladry, and even a couple of more adventurous jazz tunes, each sung beautifully by Massachusetts native Anne Walsh, now residing in Los Angeles, where she performs and teaches. "At age seven, I wanted to be Shirley Jones," she has joked, and on the way to living that dream, she first studied and practiced music therapy, then earned a master's degree in voice, and currently serves on the faculty of L.A.'s Americn Musical and Dramatic Academy. Pretty World, her first album of jazz and jazz-pop (her previous recordings include albums of lullabies and sacred music) features a variety of material from the likes of Cole Porter, Sergio Mendes, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Suzanne Vega, and more. Interestingly, Walsh commissioned lyrics for three previously instrumental jazz numbers: Don Grolnick's "Pools," Pat Metheny's "So May It Secretly Begin," and Keith Jarrett's "My Song." The lyrics, penned by drummer Joe DeRenzo, give a nice original touch to the album. Walsh has a lovely voice and is an expert interpreter of songs, bringing at once full-bodied emotion and cool control to her music, which is a pretty appealing combination in the kind of laid-back, Brazilian jazz-influenced setting she and husband/pianist/arranger/producer Tom Zink present here. The title track, Jobim's "Waters of March," "My Favorite Things," Vega's "Caramel," and the aforementioned "Pools" are early favorites, but the whole album is a pleasing, relaxing listen and is likely to make even reluctant listeners smile. And more smiles, of course, make for a prettier world.