Diana Ross - Lady Sings The Blues CDs • Vinyl Records • LPs • Music Albums

for possession on her deathbed—wasn't grisly enough.

Several older critics, people who grew up listening to Holiday, have suggested that even though Diana Ross was successful in capturing a part of the Holiday verve and sound, her performances should be expunged and purged in order not to blur memory any more than need be. Go back to the real Holiday, they say, and feel better rather than lingering on the strange and disquieting depression that comes after seeing this film.

In two senses they're right: The hoked-up luridness of the film deprives us of any true impression of what the lady and her music were all about, and adds insult to injury. The character Piano Man was probably meant to be an amalgam of Teddy Wilson and Lester Young and implicitly brings discredit to both; it's doubtful that bandleader Artie Shaw turned Holiday on to smack as does his counterpart in the film—etcetera ad nauseam. And the film leads one to forget that Holiday was a musician and not a professional junkie. You tend to forget about the sass and glory of "Miss Brown to You" or the emotive pain of "Billie's Blues" after watching Ross' Holiday tie off and get high on the toilet. The movie leaves out all the class: They can put it on television real soon.

The soundtrack record suffers from the association but still comes off as probably Diana Ross' most sophisticated recording. The first two sides of the double LP contain snatches of trenchant dialogue, guaranteed to bring back the drear of the film, interspersed with minute-length segments of song and Michel Legrand's always tawdry, kitsch-laden "love themes." The other two sides consist of Diana Ross emulating Holiday's recordings of the middle and late Forties, and strangely enough it works. She does 11 tunes in a style that's an honest compromise between an accurate representation of Holiday's horn-like whiskey voice and the way Diana Ross would naturally do these songs in front of a band on her own sessions. Her "Fine And Mellow" is good enough to make me prefer it over any of the numerous versions by Holiday; not so with "Lover Man," "Strange Fruit," "God Bless the Child" and others which I thought had almost died with the woman with whom they were so closely identified. But Ross su