Customer Reviews

Cocktail Hour: Dinah Shore

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Dinah Shore always had a pleasant voice, and like Doris Day, she is always under-rated by jazz buffs, this is a good compilation of Dinah Shore's 40's sessions. Recommended to jazz vocal fans and nostalgia fans alike. Also look hard in second hand record shops for Dinah Sings Some Blues With Red Norvo, and Dinah Sings Previn Plays "Songs In A Midnight Mood" with Andre Previn and his trio, for Dinah Shore in a more jazz oriented setting.

I've never had such a bad surprise from Amazon's items such as I had with this double cd-set by Dinah Shore: I was simply astounded by the terrible audio quality and the incredible bad packaging I received. The double cd case is so very thin, that even inside a huge cardboard box used to post the material, it arrived slightly cracked. But this was really irrelevant, compared to the real surprise I got when I put the cd in the player: an incredibly distant voice sighed out from a very dull MONO source that was just lowered in order not leT the background tape noise be heard: it feels as if an old and tired Dinah is quietly singing for the other room, while the door's firmly closed... I decided to buy this cd just because I loved the song `Two silhouettes' I had heard on the `Make mine music' Disney DVD, but it had been far better (and far more cheaper) to record this track from that stereo source, which at least was a decent one. My score for this item: zero. Don't buy this rubbish, unless you want to listen to it on your car cd-player while you're driving 110 Mph on the highway and the window's open. I will return mine to sender.

All good tracks and the audio is clean. The CD is very worth having and in my case is played often. If anyone is unfamiliar with Dinah's smooth song style, this is a good introduction.

Dinah Shore is a tough singer to collect -- there are literally dozens of compilations of her recordings, including many collections of her records from the 1940s, and none of these collections is unique. There's a great deal of overlap from compilation to compilation, so you end up buying a some just to get a handful of tracks that you haven't found elsewhere.

I purchased this compilation for just such a reason; there are a couple of tracks here that I didn't have on the dozen or so other compilations I own. This gave me the opportunity to compare the quality of the audio on this set with some other sets.

This CD is, sound-wise, terrible. There are no liner notes whatsoever, so there's no word on what source was used for the CD, but it sounds as if they used scratchy 78 rpm records as the source for most of the tracks. Almost every track on this CD can be found on different compilations with vastly superior audio quality.

Audio quality gets one star, and I'm adding another star just because the songs and performances are truly great -- Dinah is the best!

So I'd caution potential buyers to keep this in mind when deciding on a Dinah Shore CD. Unless there's a track on here that you just can't find anywhere else, I'd stick with one of the many other compilations of her music.