Customer Reviews

Ballads: Dinah Washington

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

Tired remakes of better earlier releases, made in the twilight of Dinah's career when her voice had but a fraction of its earlier power and stamina. It's painful to hear her wobble her way through a shortened soft-soap version of "I'll close my eyes", and to hear her impaired intonation on the high notes. My advice is, to choose from the many excellent albums out there. "Jazz Round Midnight" and "Dinah Washington Sings Standards", both by Verve are good ones, and "The Fats Waller Songbook" and "Dinah!", both by EmArcy are top notch. Any of these albums will give you a much better representation of Ms. Washington's incredible versatility, awesome expressive powers, and unmatched ability to seamlessly integrate with an instrumental group of any size or composition.

These songs were done toward the end of Dinah's career and are somewhat overproduced. However, her phrasing and emotion that she is known for is there. A couple of the tracks cannont be found on any other compilation, namely her haunting version of "What's New." A must for Dinah fans. Kudos to Roulette for the selections.

This is a great collection. The songs are all pop/jazz standards recorded in 1962 and 1963. Two things I particularly like about his CD is that it includes "A Stranger on Earth" (later used as the title track to Lina's beautiful album) and only one song ("I'll Close My Eyes", but a different recording) overlaps with Dinah's "Mad About the Boy" [Crimson, 1997] collection. Not much track information is provided; no photos of Dinah, either.

Anything that Dinah does I love. I was looking for the song stranger on earth for the longest time and finally found it on this compilation. Of course, I was very very happy with this cd.