When I was a kid, I had my Billie Holiday pile, which was one kind of stuff, and my other stuff was stuff like Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, June Christy, Stan Kenton-because I was a West Coast kid, and that was the West Coast jazz. I knew those songs, too, because I grew up hearing Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and those kinds of things. With ‘Time After Time,’ it was more fun, because I didn’t have to be as cerebral. I didn’t want it to be perfect, but I wanted to be right. With the Billie Holiday project, I was trying to stay so reserved, and I was scared, too, because I hadn’t ever done that kind of a record. She maintained a career over the years, though she lost about a decade, from the mid-’60s to early ‘70s, to heroin addiction. Of course, the truth is that jazz was never a foreign musical tongue for James, who began her run of R & B hits in the ‘50s, but one of her biggest early singles wasthe jazzy “At Last” in 1961 (which can now be heard in a Jaguar commercial). Last spring, she seconded the motion with an even better jazz project, “Time After Time.” Here, she goes both ways, deftly switching between jazzy melodic contours and bluesy riffs on such tunes as “Willow Weep for Me” and the gospel-tinged “Someone to Watch Over Me.” This experiment won her widespread accolades and her first Grammy award. The identity slalom began with last year’s “Mystery Lady, Songs of Billie Holiday,” on the Private label, James’ first bona fide “jazz” album in her 40-year career. Of late, the real Etta James, the infamous blues belter and master of bump ‘n’ grinding innuendo, has been standing up, facing music beyond the blues.
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