Annie Ross album of Billie Holiday songs has air of swansong

Annie Ross says her new album, To Lady With Love, was recorded in just five hours. However, the emotional preparation for it has taken the greater part of a lifetime.

Ross - an actress and singer best known for her vocalese recordings in the 1950s and 1960s as a soloist and with Lambert, Hendricks & Ross - was just 15 years old when she first heard Billie Holiday on record, singing Strange Fruit.

"It made my blood run cold," she says in the spoken introduction with which the album begins. "She became my idol, my mentor, my friend. She remained my favourite until the very end. Your voice was always in my head, its message clear and true."

Ross is now 84 years old and although she still appears every Tuesday at the Metropolitan Room in New York, this album has the air of a swansong project. In the final track, Music is Forever, co-written with Russ Freeman, she name-checks a long list of gone-but-not-forgotten jazz greats, all of them known to her personally to varying degrees. Among them are Kenny Clarke, who fathered her son, Kenny Jnr, and Duke Ellington, who introduced her to Holiday.

Between the self-penned bookends of To Lady With Love are 10 songs, all recorded by Holiday, for the most part late in her career when the ravages of a life lived hard had taken their toll on her voice. Seven are from the last album released in Holiday's lifetime, 1958's Lady in Satin - a set which owes its generally high critical reputation to the naked emotion of her performances and the "truth" Ross refers to rather than the technical merits of her singing.

Ross has had her share of fraught relationships and hard times, including a spell of heroin addiction, and clearly identifies not just with the lyrics of these wistful torch songs, but with the extra depth of feeling Holiday put into them.