Billie Holiday & All Star Band - 'Fine And Mellow'

Time for some blues, and who better than Billie Holiday at the end of her career, when she was a personification of the blues? The focus isn't sharp, but this lends the video a rather spectral quality that seems appropriate for such a legion of giants from the past, many of whom were already metaphorical ghosts from the bygone swing era. It's one of the most famous live broadcasts in jazz history, so even if the music weren't as fine and mellow as it certainly is, it would be impossible to overlook this one.

The performance was broadcast live from CBS Studio 58 on December 8^th, 1957 as part of the CBS TV series, The Seven Lively Arts. The Columbia arm of the mighty CBS corporation subsequently released an album based on the broadcast the following year (although it wasn't a direct transcript of this live performance). The assembly of musicians, which has been described as possibly the finest ever, included the three tenor saxophonists who were arguably the most important progenitors of their instrument in a jazz context. In order of their solos: Ben Webster, late of the Duke Ellington orchestra and sometimes nicknamed 'The Brute' even though he could melt the heart of the most diehard misanthrope with a single breathy note from his horn, who would move to Europe in 1964 and end his days in Copenhagen; Lester Young, late of the Count Basie orchestra, and Billie Holiday's confidante and 'Prez' (or 'Pres'), who wore his pork-pie hat and blew his light-as-a-feather tenor at the jauntiest of angles; and Coleman Hawkins, 'Bean', who developed his gruff reedy sound in the Fletcher Henderson orchestra as the very first star of the tenor saxophone.

Add to that list: star of the West Coast 'cool school' and pioneer with Chet Baker of the piano-less quartet, Gerry Mulligan on the big baritone horn, looking as preppy as a college boy – as he did in the '50s before the beard took over in the more hirsute '60s; the bridge between Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie, Roy 'Little Jazz' Eldridge on trumpet, who gave Anita O'Day her first hit with 'Let Me Off Uptown' and whose solo features the kind of top-note theatrics that he employed as a regular for Norman Granz's barn-storming Jazz At The Philharmonic concerts; and, thoroughly 'good egg' and, like Lester Young, a great wearer of hats (although disappointingly both are bare-headed here), Vic Dickenson on trombone.

Virtually unseen, even as we pull back at the end are: house pianist for the Prestige label and Billie Holiday's accompanist for the last two years or so of her life, Mal Waldron on piano; Doc Cheatham on second trumpet; Danny Barker on guitar; Osie Johnson on drums; and Milt Hinton on bass, a keen photographer who recorded many such moments as these for posterity.

It is, though, Billie Holiday of course who's the real star of the show. She's the one who introduces the piece and the 'two kinds of blues: happy blues and sad blues' in a voice that by then was worn out by singing, drugs and her legendary life of abuse, neglect, a certain fame and probably ultimate disappointment. A lot of her late recordings are almost too tired and world-weary to listen to. If she sang 'happy blues' in her early days, skipping lightly through popular songs of the day in a voice that 'rang like a bell and went a mile', just behind the beat of big bands led by the likes of Teddy Wilson and Count Basie, by her early 40s she sounded like she was singing painfully 'sad blues'. The camera takes no prisoners. In close-up, she looks half-stoned and around 20 years older than someone in her early middle age, yet her face lights up as she listens to what these great musicians have to offer, most famously during Lester Young's brief and equally weary solo just past the two-minute marker. As ABC once sang, 'that's the look, the look of love.'

Lady Day and her President were supposedly never actually lovers, but they were soul-mates who shared a special bond and understood each other's pain and glory. Lester Young was scarred by his time in a white man's army at the tail end of the war, which he described as 'a nightmare – one mad nightmare.' He and Billie had just a couple of years to live after this performance was recorded. The great Canadian orchestrator, Gil Evans, was due to make an album with the saxophonist, but revealed that although 'he wanted to make the album, ... he wanted to die more.' Young died of a heart attack in a hotel room after getting back from Paris (his story is conflated with those of Bud Powell and Dexter Gordon in Bertrand Tavernier's film, Round Midnight). Billie followed him a few months later. She was refused permission to adopt a baby and supposedly would feed her pet Chihuahua from a baby's bottle. On her deathbed in hospital, she was arrested for possession of narcotics.