The Very Best of Julie London

his two-disc set, generous at 50 tracks, is probably the most comprehensive Julie London anthology available. While certainly no match for her more technically accomplished contemporaries, London was a fine, appealing singer who used her cool, understated alto to excellent advantage.

London is best known for her signature song "Cry Me a River", and that's here, of course, but her sultry take on standards like "When I Fall in Love", "I Left My Heart in San Francisco", and "Body and Soul" are nothing to scoff at. While some of her later recordings can suffer from excessive orchestration, London's vocal stylings are always on point, as the wealth of material on this EMI collection proves.|

The Very Best of Julie London offers an extensive overview of London's recording career with 50 selections she cut for Liberty Records between 1955 and 1969. The tracks are not newly remastered for the most part, but are taken from EMI's series of import two-fers and the domestic reissues Ron Furmanek and Bob Norberg produced in the early '90s. London was an album artist, not a singles artist -- she had only one hit single in her long career -- but she was a consistent favorite with adult contemporary and vocal jazz audiences and recorded over 20 LPs. Her albums often sustained a certain mood or assembled songs around a theme, but The Very Best of Julie London chops up her albums and rearranges the songs in no particular order -- the repertoire and sequencing seem almost random. The booklet provides no recording dates or session information, but readers can learn from which albums most of the tracks hail by wading through the liner notes. The anthology is useful for those who would like to sample London's 1960s album catalog without investing in several import CDs, but Julie Is Her Name, Vols. 1-2 remains the best introduction to the music of this sultry, sexy vocalist. ~ Greg Adams