More of the Music of Billie Holiday
Hot Stamper Pressings of Pop and Jazz Vocal Albums
The better copies reproduce clearly what to our minds are the three most important elements in the recording — strings, rhythm, and vocal — and, more importantly, they are properly balanced with one another.
The monos, as you might expect, balance the three elements well enough, but the problem with mono is that the vocals and instruments are jammed together in the center of the soundfield, layered atop one another.
Real clarity, the kind that live music has in abundance, is difficult if not impossible under those circumstances.
Only the stereo pressings provide the space that each of the players needs in order to be heard.
Naturally the vocals have to be the main focus on a Billie Holiday record. They should be rich and tubey, yet clear, breathy and transparent.
To qualify as a Hot Stamper, the pressings we offer must be highly resolving. You will hear everything, all of it surrounded by the natural space of the legendary Columbia 30th Street Studio in which the recording was made.
Side One
I’m a Fool to Want You
For Heaven’s Sake
You Don’t Know What Love Is
I Get Along Without You Very Well
For All We Know
Violets for Your Furs
Side Two
You’ve Changed
It’s Easy to Remember
But Beautiful
Glad to Be Unhappy
I’ll Be Around
The End of a Love Affair
AMG Review
This is the most controversial of all Billie Holiday records. Lady Day herself said that this session (which finds her accompanied by Ray Ellis’ string orchestra) was her personal favorite, and many listeners have found her emotional versions of such songs as “I’m a Fool to Want You,” “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” “Glad to Be Unhappy,” and particularly “You’ve Changed” to be quite touching…
It’s been quite a while since I played the Classic Records pressing that came out in 1998, but I remember it as nothing special, tonally correct but with somewhat low-rez (not breathy) vocals and lacking in both space and warmth.
Records made for audiophiles are rarely any good, so rarely in fact that we are positively shocked when such records are even halfway decent. After playing so many bad audiophile records for so many years it’s practically a truism here at Better Records.
A recording like this is the perfect example of why we pay no attention whatsoever to the bona fides of the disc, but instead make our judgments strictly on the merits of the record spinning on the table. The listener normally does not even know the label of the pressing he is reviewing. It could be a Six Eye original, the 360 reissue, or even a (gasp!) ’70s-era LP.
We don’t care what the label is. What does that have to do with anything? We’re looking for the best sound. We don’t play labels, we play unique pressings of the album. We assume that every pressing sounds different from every other pressing. Our job is to figure out what each of them is doing, right or wrong.
We mix up all our copies and play them one after another until we come across the best sounding one.
This approach has opened up a world of sound that most audiophiles — at least the ones who buy into the hype associated with the typical audiophile pressing — will never be able to experience.