The Blues Bloggers

Songs for Distingué Lovers is a stereo album by jazz singer Billie Holiday released in 1957 on Verve Records, originally a ten-inch record, catalogue MGV 8257. It was recorded at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles from January 3 to January 9, 1957, and produced by Norman Granz. This was Holiday's fifth studio album. Granz and Holiday chose familiar items from the Great American Songbook of classic pop for the album, Holiday singing in the context comfortable for her, that of a small jazz band. The original album consisted of six standards, five of which by songwriters whom would be categorically tackled by Ella Fitzgerald on her Songbooks series. The sessions reunited Holiday with trumpeter Harry Edison and saxophonist Ben Webster, both of whom the singer had worked with during the 1930 and 1940s, Edison as a member of the Count Basie Orchestra during her brief stay as the band's girl singer, and Webster from the recordings under her own name for Vocalion Records and Okeh Records.

A ten-inch long-playing album could hold approximately seventeen minutes of music per side, making this album well within the standard parameters for running time. Songs for Distingué Lovers was reissued by Verve Records on October 28, 1997, as part of its Master Edition series, remastering using 20-bit technology with six bonus tracks. The extra tracks were all recorded at the same sessions, and taken from other Holiday ten-inch albums of the late 1950s on Verve. "I Wished on the Moon" and "Love Is Here to Stay" were from MGV 8329, All or Nothing At All, and the other four from MGV 8197, Body and Soul.

Track list:

Side one

"Day In, Day Out" (Johnny Mercer, Rube Bloom) – 6:47
"A Foggy Day" (Ira Gershwin, George Gershwin) – 4:40
"Stars Fell on Alabama" (Frank Perkins, Mitchell Parish) – 4:28

Side two

"One for My Baby" (Johnny Mercer, Harold Arlen) – 5:39
"Just One of Those Things" (Cole Porter) – 5:31
"I Didn't Know What Time It Was" (Lorenz Hart, Richard Rodgers) – 5:59

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