An Evening With Billie Holiday by Billie Holiday

An Evening with Billie Holiday, Lady Day's second studio album, came out on Clef in 1953 as a 10-inch record, with Norman Granz producing, and it catches her in the '50s, when she was a concert draw who could sell out Carnegie Hall. The phrasing is pure horn player: she lays back behind the beat, bends a line out of shape and lets a word hang until it aches.

"Stormy Weather" is the standout, sung like the storm has already moved in and decided to stay. When the 10-inch format died off in 1956, Clef reissued the album as a 12-inch LP called A Recital by Billie Holiday, keeping seven of the eight songs and adding five from her third 10-inch record, while "Tenderly" went off to another collection, Solitude.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.