Fudo Jun is a beautiful supermodel who is idolized by many. She also has a dark secret that not even she knows about at first, for within her veins run the genes that hold the next step in the evolution of mankind. The same blood as the beastlike superhumans that terrorize the city. Unlike the rest of them, though, Jun has managed to hold a tenuous grip onto her humanity, and she is recruited by the mysterious Asuka Ran, member of a secret organization within the government, aimed at controlling, if not eliminating, these berserk destroyers of mankind. Jun, as Devilman Lady, must now exterminate her own kind, but how much longer can she keep her sanity in a situation she never chose in the first place.

If hot jazz was defined by Louis Armstrong in the 1920s, then the lyrical side of jazz found its perfect exponents in Billie Holiday and Lester Young during the 1930s and 1940s. Their collaborations revealed a different side of the jazz art form. Here we can savor emotion without cheap sentimentality, simplicity without simple-mindedness, a force of expression that is achieved through restraint and understatement. In the long lineage of cool jazz, we constantly find the creative bursts coming at us through the work of couples -- Bix & Tram, Miles & Gil, Getz & Gilberto -- almost as if music this sensitive required some sort of magnetic, mutual attraction, an exemplary pairing to make it possible. Call it a musical romance, if you will. But at the top of the hierarchy, our First Lady (Day) and Pres of the democracy of cool jazz are Billie and Lester. "All of Me" ranks among the finest of their classic sides, and it is hard to say which of the two gets the upper hand here. Let's call it a tossup. A must have recording for anyone interested in the history of jazz vocals or the evolution of the tenor sax.

Lady Sings the Blues expands the template of jazz-driven torch songs to embrace soul and '60s pop as well, thus its success at presenting a compilation with depth and variety.