Lady in Satin

Lady in Satin was her eleventh studio album and the penultimate one she completed. Columbia released it in 1958 as CL 1157 in mono and CS 8048 in stereo. Irving Townsend produced it and Fred Plaut engineered it. The mono issue carried one extra track, "The End of a Love Affair".

For most of the 1950s she had recorded for Norman Granz on Clef and Verve, always with small jazz groups. By 1957 she had made twelve albums for him and was unhappy. In October 1957 she told Townsend she wanted to record with Ray Ellis. She had first thought of Nelson Riddle after hearing his arrangements for Frank Sinatra, in particular In the Wee Small Hours, but she changed her mind after hearing Ellis's version of "For All We Know". Townsend said he was surprised, comparing it to Ella Fitzgerald asking to record with Ray Conniff. He recalled her asking over and over for a pretty album, something delicate. Ellis said he could not believe it and had not known she was aware of him.

Columbia gave the project an unlimited budget. The musicians were paid $60 for the three sessions and Holiday was paid $150 per side in advance. The dates were set for late February 1958. It was her return to Columbia after sixteen years, and the label wanted songs she had not recorded before. Ellis wrote for a 40-piece orchestra with horns, strings, reeds and a three-piece choir, the most expensive production of her career. Mel Davis, Urbie Green and J. J. Johnson took solos.

The reception has been divided. The Penguin Guide to Jazz gave it three stars out of four, and the Rolling Stone Jazz Record Guide said it presents the Lady overdressed. Trumpeter Buck Clayton preferred her later work to that of the younger woman he knew in the 1930s. Ellis, speaking in 1997, said he had been unhappy with her performance in the control room but changed his mind on hearing the final mix weeks later. Legacy Records reissued it on 23 September 1997 with four bonus tracks, and in 2020 Rolling Stone placed it at number 317 on its list of 500 greatest albums. A three-CD Centennial Edition followed on 14 April 2015. In December 2020 M. Ward released Think of Spring, a tribute built on the album's songs.