Customer Reviews
A good buy - By: fivestarfrankie, 19 Aug 2008 
if you quite like smooth jazz. If you are a real jazz fan you wouldn't want it. I think it's a nice mix of the familer & the less so & a safe five star purchase.
I like it a lot, but... - By: Lizi, 01 Jun 2006 it's not jazz.
I love every single song on these CDs & yes, as someone else pointed out, they are songs you'd recognise from films & adverts.
If you're a hardcore out & out jazz fan then this CD isn't really for you, but if you like easy listening jazzesque sounds then go for it, this CD is gorgeous.
Don't buy this cd! - By: , 12 Feb 2006 
I often read the reviews on Amazon, if I am not sure on whether to buy a cd or not. I tend to go on the fact that if there are 4 good reviews & only one bad one, then that's a safe ratio & I buy it. This is why I feel compelled to warn you about this cd. If you see the tunes you recognise & like & hope the others will be familiar, then forget it. There are one or two good tunes on here & the rest of the cd is padded out with the sort of tunes you hear when you call the gas company & you're waitingin a queue. I was so disappointed by this cd & wish more people had given it the review it truly deserves.
Neither the best, nor smooth, nor jazz - By: David Abbott, 02 Aug 2004 It's always faintly embarrassing buying a compilation albumin a store, because it just screams that you don't know much about the genre. I've always been happy enough to do it for pop music & am the proud owner of several of the Now That's What I Call Music series, on the basis that I don't really care much for pop music anyway & it's a cost-effective way of getting hold of the few good tracks that are worth owning without shelling out on masses of singles or, worse, mediocre albums where only one song is single-worthy. But I've suffered for this policy, with several of my friends getting very sniffy & telling me that I have neither a defined musical taste nor sufficient critical faculties.
Finally with The Very Best Of Smooth Jazz, I've discovered exactly what they mean. This is an album pitched squarely at people who have heard one or two tracks accompanying television adverts & want to hear more of the same. Even the track listing admits as much, with its "as heard on" subtitles.
This means that vast swathes of this double-CD collection are filled with the sort of music that, if you heardin a lift, would make you get out & walk up fourteen storeys just to avoid. For every genuine classic - Ella Fitzgerald's performance is, of course, utterly brilliant - there are at least half a dozen songs which aren't even jazz, but arein fact quasi-jazz MotR easy-listening rubbish. It's unfortunate that Amazon won't allow reviewers to use obscenities because a nice earthy metaphor for excrement would comein quite handy for describing some of the tracks here.
I'd go so far as to say that even the likes of Louis Armstrong's song included here, better known as a Bond theme tune, isn't real jazz either. To include one of the world's greatest ever jazz musicians but to select a non-jazz track is very disappointing but effortlessly sums up the publisher's intentions.
My recommendation, & Amazon makes this spectacularly easy to achieve, is that you avoid this album & instead, dipin to the jazz section & find a couple of albums that reviewers recommend whole-heartedly. There is plenty of really good "smooth jazz" waiting to be discovered but it would be absolutely tragic if anyone heard this particular album & came to the conclusion that it is anywhere near the best that the genre has to offer.
AMAZING! - By: , 20 Nov 2003 This album is one of my all-time favourites! A great mixture of some of the best, most relaxing & classic jazz tunes around. Read the track list & you'll see what I mean...
