This set of Billie Holiday singing in Basel on 4 February 1954 – during her first European tour – was originally released as Lady Love on the United Artists label. It was as part of the Jazz Club USA tour, named after Leonard Feather's (who acted as MC during the tour) radio show on Voice of America. Such was Holiday's notoriety at the time (her well publicised drugs busts etc) that on the first night, 12 January 1954 in Stockholm, she failed to sing well and a hypodermic syringe was found in her dressing room after the show. At that point there was a move to send her immediately home. It was only Red Norvo's impassioned intervention that prevented this happening, and thereafter she actually sang extremely well, better, in fact, than many recordings of the period made in the USA for Verve. There were a couple of reasons for this: she was away from the regular dope pushers so temptation for heroin was removed and the reception she received from enthusiastic European audiences overwhelmed and uplifted her. Throughout, she battled to keep her drinking under control, on one occasion her facial muscles were seen twitching, as she begged for a drink no one felt she should have. In short she was being properly looked after, and her performance in Basel, together with her set at Brussels (in-between her Cologne concert and this), included as bonus tracks, are probably the best of Holiday's latter period (she died five years later). On the Jazz Club tour she was normally allocated about 10 numbers, at which point the other members of the musical cast – Buddy DeFranco, Red Norvo, Sonny Clark, Jimmy Raney – would assemble with Holiday and her group for an impromptu jazz session to round out the concert, which is the routine the Basel concert follows. Bonus tracks (in addition to her Brussels concert) include five tracks made for the Aladdin Label in 1951 which are pretty grim, and her underrated masterpiece with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra from 1942, ‘Trav'lin Light,’ which captures her mature style at her best.