Following the success of Nina Simone: Remixed & Reimagined, Legacy Recordings continues to expand the jazz paradigm with Billie Holiday: Remixed & Reimagined, the second installment of a new series that taps contemporary dance and electronic music’s most sought-after producers/remixers to reinterpret classic recordings for a new generation. The resulting 14-track anthology and the first official remix package to feature selections from Holiday’s landmark Columbia Records catalog is a beguiling manifesto of love, beauty, rhythm and poetry that demonstrates a reverence for the timeless originals and a fearlessness to turn them upside down and inside out. For the uninitiated, the name “Billie Holiday” is synonymous with depth, sophistication and the golden age of 20th Century jazz, blues and swing. Born Eleanora Harris on April 7, 1915, she would later ascend to the summit of the idiom as its quintessential auteur. The richness of Holiday’s musical compositions were rivaled only by her, at turns, bewitchingly frail vocal style and spellbinding throaty croon. Her music remains alive with a wealth of colorful emotions and moods (ranging from innocent, romantic, confident and blissfully existential to melancholic, disillusioned and bittersweet), and her voice still haunts with its dexterity and brutal sincerity.

Billie Holiday: Remixed & Reimagined reawakens and reaffirms our fascination with jazz’s most beloved heroine. Roland Richards and Ladybug Mecca energize “Spreadin' Rhythm Around” with their reinterpretation which recasts the original as a surging “hip-hop meets swing” anthem which just might usher in the next wave of the Rebirth of Cool. “Trav’lin’ All Alone” becomes a sinister urban affair at the hands of veteran hip hop/funk/modern soul mixmasters Nickodemus and Zeb, who inject the vintage swing tune with shuffling percussion and bottom-heavy dub undercurrents. Master DJ/turntablist and sonic manipulator DJ Logic cunningly modernizes “Glad To Be Unhappy” into a cinematic mosaic that weaves the majestic opening and closing orchestration from the original with a chunky terrain of slow-burning soul, funk, ambient and jazz nuances. Billie Holiday: Remixed & Reimagined is a lovingly assembled homage to the First Lady of Jazz’s legacy. More than just a simple remix package, the 14-track set underscores the importance of the original recordings while retooling them for an audience more inclined to a modern club environment.