AMG Review of Essential Ray Conniff

Stephen Thomas Erlewine
All Music Guide

There have been countless Ray Conniff collections over the years, with most of them covering the same familiar hits, but few of them have been as ambitious and comprehensive as Columbia/Legacy's double-disc 2004 release The Essential Ray Conniff. At 36 tracks, it's much larger than most CD-era Conniff comps, which tended to be budget-line releases like 16 Most Requested Songs, and it also covers more territory, opening with 1957's "S'Wonderful" and ending with a previously unreleased version of "My Way" from 1998. Between those two points, his biggest hits, including "Somewhere, My Love (Lara's Theme from Doctor Zhivago)," are covered, but as his daughter Tamara makes clear in her liner notes, unlike some Conniff collections, the focus here isn't on the charts. Instead, she has chosen a range of songs that convey the scope of his musical achievements, so it samples his work as a classical arranger, film composer, soft-pop arranger, and trombonist. The result is the best Conniff collection to date, since it's not only the only compilation that attempts to tackle his entire body of work, it succeeds in doing so.