VARIOUS ARTISTS
The Best Blue Note Album in the World Ever!
(Blue Note)
Reviewed by Steve Marshall

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It's gotta be hard for a label like Blue Note to put together a compilation like this. Their name has been synonymous with jazz for decades. Just about any jazz musician you can think of has recorded for them at some point. OK, maybe that's stretching it a bit. Still, their artist roster reads like a 'who's who' of jazz. So how do you condense 60 years of great jazz onto two CDs? Well, you start by taking 'signature' tracks from your biggest artists. Then you start eliminating things.

Anyone who considers themselves a jazz lover will find fault with this collection. It's inevitable. There's no way they could include everything that everyone wants to hear. As great as it was, not even the label's mammoth 14-CD box set could handle that task. Even so, these two CDs contain enough of the 'hits' to send anyone with a credit card off on a huge buying spree. This compilation will appeal mainly to the jazz newbies, but the aficionados out there are sure to find plenty to enjoy here as well.

TRACK LIST:

DISC 1 - Song for My Father (Horace Silver) * Blue Train (John Coltrane) * Moanin' (Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers) * Blues Walk (Lou Donaldson) * Autumn Leaves (Cannonball Adderly) * Midnight Blue (Kenny Burrell) * The Sidewinder (Lee Morgan) * Watermelon Man (Herbie Hancock) * Amen (Donald Byrd) * Born to be Blue (Grant Green)

DISC 2 - Cantaloop (US3) * The Turnaround (John Patton) * Greasy Granny (Charlie Hunter Trio) * Back at the Chicken Shack (Jimmy Smith) * Soy Califa (Dexter Gordon) * Girl From Ipanema (Eliane Elias) * Thinkin' About Your Body (Bobby McFerrin) * Tupelo Honey (Cassandra Wilson) * At Last (Lou Rawls & Dianne Reeves) * Because I Love You (Richard Elliot)

(C) 1998 - Steve Marshall