A complete Commodore set by vocalist Billie Holiday was actually released by Universal in 1997, so is long out of catalogue. The Essential Jazz Classics set duplicates this edition, but the discographical information is imprecise – ‘How Am I To Know’ was issued as a composite using portions of Take 1 and Take 2; a defective groove in the piano introduction of ‘My Old Flame’ was replaced by editing from a preceding incomplete take, and so on, but this information is not available – neither is it clear what take the issued masters were. They do, however, include two bonus tracks, ‘Any Old Time’ by Artie Shaw, who wrote the piece to feature Holiday's style when she was with his big band, and ‘Trav’lin Light’ with Paul Whiteman, one of her best pre-Decca sides. Included, of course, is the dirge ‘Strange Fruit’, given a powerful and moving performance by Holiday, the juke-box hits ‘Billie's Blues’ and ‘Fine and Mellow’ – two of precious few examples of the Lady actually singing the blues – and ‘I'll Get By’, a favourite of thousands of homesick GI's in WWII. Today, Eddie Heywood's accompaniment, particularly on the 1944 tracks, appears somewhat perfunctory and lacks the empathy of the ad hoc bands assembled under Teddy Wilson's aegis for Columbia. The choice of songs by Holiday fit the autobiographical subtext of her night club performances, where her stage persona presented someone unlucky in love – thus ‘I Cover the Waterfront’, ‘How Am I To Know’, ‘My Old Flame’, ‘I Got a Right to Sing the Blues’, and so on.