In the mid-1990s, the Times of London flogged a very cool disk-per-week club that was everything eclectic can mean. One of those CDs, betitled with formidable understatement simply Two Jazz Ladies, featured Ella and Billie, two African-American stage presences who set the bar on what it meant for a lady to sing the blues.
This disk apportions five chances to each of these jazz legends.
Ella sings ‘How High the Moon’, ‘Basin Street Blues’, ‘Moonlight in Vermont’, ‘Tenderly’, and ‘East of the Sun’. Billie follows with ‘You Go to My Head’, ‘Solitude’, ‘Autumn in New York’, ‘Stormy Weather’, and ‘Yesterdays’.
One of the most compelling aspects of this collection is not, strictly speaking, musical. Rather, it is social. Why did America and Americans allow Black singers like these jazz ladies to entertain us, even to address in song the deepest longings of the heart, but not to share our water fountains and public restrooms?
Canter Bridge 
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