'Whitney Houston Live' spans diva's career

More than two years after Whitney Houston's untimely death, her first live album is seeing the light of day.

Whitney Houston Live: Her Greatest Performances, out today, documents the career of the greatest pop-soul singer of her generation, from her 1983 network TV debut as a teenager (on The Merv Griffin Show) to her 2009 performance of I Didn't Know My Own Strength — from her final album, I Look To You, also released that year — on The Oprah Winfrey Show.

Also included: Houston's noted rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner from the 1991 Super Bowl, awards and talk-show appearances, and excerpts from a series of concerts Houston gave in South Africa in 1994 to honor then-president Nelson Mandela. The album is also available as a CD/DVD, with video footage.

"We always knew we were going to do this," says Pat Houston, Whitney's sister-in-law and co-executor of her estate. "It was just a matter of timing."

Performances producer Clive Davis, who worked closely with Houston throughout her career, says that they "never really discussed" a live album, as their emphasis was on "gathering original songs to bring them to the public."

The process of putting Performances together was obviously more "bittersweet," says Pat, because "Whitney's not here ... but listening to her, watching her on video, you realize that this is what she was here for. She fulfilled her purpose with music."

While Pat believes that "all of Whitney's performances were hallmark performances," she has a few sentimental favorites. A featured recording of I Believe in You and Me, from 2004's 16th Annual World Music Awards, was dedicated to Davis. In the days before the show, Pat says, "Whitney swam and meditated, had a few massages. She didn't talk. She wanted it to be perfect. And it was."

Both Pat and Davis cite Whitney's medley of I Loves You, Porgy, And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going and I Have Nothing at 1994's American Music Awards. "Apart from the powerful performances of her signature hits" on Experiences, he notes, "there are also songs she never recorded."

Davis was also moved by the concerts in Africa, which "her family made available to me. I had never seen it before, and seeing her impact on another culture gives you chills."

Pat is hoping that this first compilation of live recordings won't be the last. While touring abroad in 2010, Pat says, Whitney "did an 'unplugged' section in her show,'" and the singer had spoken of doing a more acoustically inclined tour in the USA.

"We were actually talking about it again the Thursday before she passed," Pat says. "It's one of the things we had on the table. Maybe one day we could do a Whitney Unplugged. ... It's about thinking what Whitney would have wanted, what was dear to her heart."