E-Mail This Article to a Friend Brawling Billie Holiday remembered in print and on disc; plus Doug Wamble BY JON GARELICK

The "ultimate" Billie Holiday (1915-1959) would probably be an iPod downloaded with her entire catalogues from Columbia, Commodore, Decca, Verve, and whatever other scraps are out there and then set for permanent shuffle play. But until Bono decides to make that deal his next act of global humanitarianism, we have Billie Holiday: The Ultimate Collection (Hip-0), 42 tracks spread over two CDs plus a DVD disc of filmed performances and, mysteriously, DVD-only audio tracks and interviews.

Is this the "ultimate" Billie? Maybe in the word’s true sense — "last." Where else besides iPod is there to go with the Billie Holiday discography? Critic Francis Davis tells how years ago he was combing the jazz bins in his favorite record store when a friend asked, "I wonder what they’ll be reissuing in 20 years?" "This!", Davis replied, holding up the latest "ultimate" or "essential" double-disc vinyl Billie Holiday album.

So here she comes again. There are any number of "complete" Billies out there (with another due from Verve later this year), but The Ultimate Collection is nicely portable. A novice looking for a single-disc intro to Billie has even more alternatives. You can get your Billie with Pres on Billie Holiday + Lester Young: A Musical Romance (Columbia/Legacy). Or a perfectly fine concise career overview like the Ken Burns Jazz spinoff (Verve). Or the recent Billy Remembers Billie (Verve), on which comedian Billy Crystal collects his favorites from the sessions produced by his uncle, Milt Gabler, for the Commodore and Decca labels.

One of the virtues of The Ultimate Collection is that it spans all periods and all labels, from "Miss Brown to You," recorded for Brunswick in 1935, to "I’m a Fool To Want You," recorded for the strings album Lady in Satin (Columbia) in 1958. Fans are quick to choose side among the blossoming Billie of the ’30s and ’40s, Billie the pop singer of the 1946-’51 Decca sessions, and the drunk and disorderly Billie of the mid and late ’50s. If you like the early Holiday, it’s for the swing and unselfconscious joy in her voice. Fans of the late work enjoy the chanteuse, the artist who had become her biography — every cracked note expressive of another hurt suffered. But The Ultimate Collection puts all her work into a continuum. The second half of disc two avoids some of the rougher performances — her voice is heavier, darker, but she’s still in control, and the improved production makes her sound and that of her superb small jazz bands all the more vivid, the mix putting her right up next to your ear.

HOLIDAY IS BOTH CLOSE AND DISTANT in Jane Blackburn’s With Billie (Pantheon). The book is a curious biography — or anti-biography. Blackburn, a British novelist and biographer, is here working with the transcripts of Linda Kuehl, who in the 1970s interviewed more than 100 Holiday friends and associates for a proposed biography. (Kuehl committed suicide in 1979.) Holiday biographer Donald Clarke credited Kuehl as an important source for his 1994 Wishing on the Moon but also said that he found her transcripts in too much disarray to be trusted completely, especially since the original interview tapes were unavailable.

Blackburn is undaunted. Sifting through the transcripts and listening to some of the tapes, she attempted to create a biography organized by topics and chronology but found that the massed voices of the interviewees only diluted one another. So she opted for "a documentary in which people are free to tell their own stories about Billie and it doesn’t matter if the stories don’t fit together, or even if sometimes they seem to be talking about a completely different woman." What she comes up with is a kind of oral history supplemented by her own research and follow-up interviews with some still-surviving Holiday acquaintances.

You can find versions of most of the anecdotes in Wishing on the Moon — With Billie reads like outtakes from Clarke’s more comprehensive book. Only a few well-known jazz musicians are interviewed here (Jimmy Rowles and Melba Liston being the most renowned), but we hear a lot from ex-husbands, boyfriends, distant relatives, fellow junkies, and running buddies. Blackburn fills in the interview gaps with chapters of her own on Lester Young and actress Tallulah Bankhead (with whom Holiday supposedly had an affair) and occasional historical context on Harlem and the federal drug statutes. At times, despite her best efforts, the book becomes a muddle. With one witness at a time stepping forward, we’re made to read way too often about how the same drug bust did or did not go down.