The Best of the Song Books: The Ballads

Notes

It's obvious that Verve at some point in time drown itself into the vast amount of genius material that Fitzgerald left behind her.
Both monumental (hence to some point hard to digest in its entirety) and rich enough to develop a consistency across releases, the Songbooks were the perfect material to endlessly build "samplers" and thematic compilations.
This (serie) is one of these attempts at making the customer swallow yet again the same thing advertised in a way appealing to some specific category of persons.
While this definitely is not bad, and while some people can find great pleasure in digging it (with reasons), this pretty much pose the problem of the essentially destructive nature of compilations: the better they are, the less their relevance is obvious when compared to the original releases (which at least bear the artist intent) - the more they are, the less likely they are to accompany the newcomers to the original releases, lost into a sea of redundant, infinitely intersecting packages that customers finally grow tired of, leading them away rather than to the heart.

Dig this if you really can't help buying compilations (this release actually is one of the very best introduction to the songbooks, a perfect entrance for newcomers) - otherwise, you should really consider moving to the original releases if you don't want to follow Verve into sinking...