Various Artists - Windham Hill Sampler '94

The Best of the (many) Windham Hill Samplers

I've been a huge fan of Windham Hill recordings over the years, especially of their excellent samplers. While most were woefully short (owing in part to some simultaneous releases on vinyl LPs in the '80s), those released into the mid-90s had a much better value quotient to them (I had always felt they overpriced the samplers).

This is, in my humble opinion, the best. It's not that the artists are significantly different than many other Windham Hill sampler CDs - you get the usual assortment of Oystein Sevag, Alex de Grassi, et al. - it's the music that's better, more refined, and ultimately, more representative of those artists' most mature and honed works. They didn't hold back on this one. The tracks here probably are the best single songs pulled from their respective albums. The overall mood of the album is downtempo, and at times melancholic - perhaps an appropriate swan song for a label that has sadly lost its spark from the brilliant early years of its existence.

I'm not sure why this is out of stock as I write this - perhaps it's temporarily out of print. Even if you have only a passing interest in this genre, get this CD. It's sublime. March 3, 2004

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