The emphasis on this single-CD collection of Columbia-era tunes is on both the familiar chestnuts that were frequently requested at Billie Holiday's live performances and those that made up her radio hits output. Several of the tracks are repeats from the Love Songs and Greatest Hits discs, representing a neatly packaged 16-song sampler of Holiday's efforts in the late 1930s (and in one case, the 1950s). Benny Goodman pops up as another of Holiday's accompanist-admirers, contributing to the opening track, "Miss Brown to You." And from 1941 comes the always disquieting "Gloomy Sunday," a chronicle of suicide. Not much touches Holiday at her best, as she is here. --Willard Jenkins

The title of 16 Most Requested Songs isn't quite right: In fact, these are some chart hits (and some non-hits) that Holiday recorded with Teddy Brown's orchestra and her own early in her career (between 1935 and 1941), plus the awkward, very late number "I'm a Fool to Want You," from 1958. On the earlier tracks, Billie's a gritty but fairly ordinary jazz singer with a few nifty devices, though the bands are ace (they include Benny Goodman, Lester Young, and members of Duke Ellington and Count Basie's groups), and she swings like she rarely would later on. By the end of the disc, though, the classics start coming--"Gloomy Sunday," "God Bless the Child"--and the deep, abiding sadness that made her great emerges. --Douglas Wolk