WHAT A WASTE:

Holiday initially recorded not as a soloist but as a "sideman" on a series of combo recordings led by Teddy Wilson, one of the top jazz pianists of the '30s.

Nevertheless, she had already become a fully formed artist. Her small, slightly raspy voice sounded at once disillusioned and hopeful, with a touch of vulnerability that was remarked on by all who heard her. "There was something about her--not just the torchy quality of her voice--that made you want to try to help her," the lyricist (and singer) Johnny Mercer recalled. She could make even the most trivial Tin Pan Alley ditties seem meaningful, and when she performed the work of such first-class songwriters as Irving Berlin and the Gershwins, she brought their immaculately crafted lyrics to vivid life without falling victim to the temptation to over-dramatize them.

Yet for all the distinctiveness of her performing persona, Holiday's appeal was rooted no less deeply in her natural musicality. Unlike Louis Armstrong, she shunned the "scat" singing that would be adopted by such later jazz vocalists as Fitzgerald and Mel Tormé. In most other ways, though, she followed his example faithfully. She phrased with extreme rhythmic freedom, lagging far behind the beat in a way that occasionally disoriented her accompanists, and decorated the melodies of the songs that she sang with (in Szwed's words) "small but unforgettable turns, up-and-down movements, fades, and drop-offs" that were all the more effective for their subtlety.

In addition to ornamenting melodies, Holiday paraphrased them in an improvisational manner directly modeled on that of Armstrong. To hear her sing such now-familiar ballads as Kern's "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" or the Gershwins' "They Can't Take That Away from Me" is to grasp at once the nature of her method: She freely altered the songs she sang, often to accommodate the limitations of her untrained voice, whose effective range was barely more than an octave. Sometimes she stuck fairly close to the tune, but just as often she was more venturesome, at times radically so.

Nowhere is Holiday's musical approach more successful than in "I Must Have That Man," a little-known 1928 show tune by Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields that she recorded when she was 21. Accompanied by a Wilson-led all-star band whose other members include Benny Goodman and Lester Young, Count Basie's incomparable tenor saxophone soloist and Holiday's favorite musical partner, she sings just one chorus of the cunningly rhymed song ("I need that person?/?Much worse'n just bad?/?I'm half alive and it's drivin' me mad"). On paper the lyric is little more than clever, but Holiday's plaintive voice transforms it into an unforgettably intimate confession of unrequited love.

It was at Café Society that Holiday started adding songs to her repertoire that were different in character from the show tunes and movie songs that she, Wilson, and Hammond had previously favored. The first and best known of them, "Strange Fruit," is a minor-key setting of a poem about a lynching. Sung at a paralytically slow tempo, it is full of melodramatic couplets whose sincerity cannot disguise their staginess: "Pastoral scene of the gallant South,?/?The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth." But Holiday embraced the song, recording it for Commodore in 1939 when Columbia, her regular label, refused to do so.If Holiday had died in 1937, the year in which she recorded "I Must Have That Man," she would still be remembered as a great singer. But she went on performing for two more decades, and in 1939 she embarked on a long-term residency at Café Society, a New York cabaret, in the course of which she changed her style deliberately and dramatically.

"Strange Fruit" would be followed by equally doleful songs such as "Gloomy Sunday," "God Bless the Child," and the quasi-autobiographical "My Man" ("He isn't true?/?He beats me, too?/?What can I do?"), all sung at the languorous, heroin-throttled crawl that Holiday increasingly preferred. Many were recorded with studio orchestras augmented by string sections, an innovation that dismayed jazz purists. Pop-music fans found her new style more accessible, though, and in 1947 she co-starred with Louis Armstrong in New Orleans, a Hollywood film about the history of jazz that might well have put her on the path to pop-culture celebrity. But she was arrested on a narcotics charge that same year, the first in a series of brushes with the law that instead turned her into a figure of scandal.

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