Rating: 4/5
Review:
Great music, but a very restricted selection
Any disc with music of this quality obviously deserves five stars. Paul Simon is one of the truly great songwriters of the last 50 years and a very fine performer, too. This selection contains half a dozen Simon & Garfunkel songs and fourteen of Simon's solo works. Every one is a gem, and I'm pleased to say that they haven't only gone for the really obvious stuff - it's good to see The Only Living Boy In New York and the superb and underrated Hearts And Bones here, for example.
That said, I can't quite see the point of this disc. It necessarily represents a tiny selection from what is now a large and distinguished body of work, and so it omits great swathes of brilliance. One glance at the track list will set you thinking "What - no...?" Or "Four songs from Bridge Over Troubled Water and not one from Parsley Sage Rosemary & Thyme?" Or any number of other questions about the selection. The problem is that you can't really do this properly in only one CD, so that many people (like me) will already have most or all of the material on the original albums, and for those who don't this probably isn't an adequate place to start.
I could be wrong, and certainly what is on the disc is brilliant. The sound quality seems excellent and the packaging (featuring, I think, the 59th Street bridge) is very attractive. If you want a skim of the surface of a brilliant musician, this will do you very well, but with all Simon & Garfunkel's albums available in a super-budget box, an excellent double CD of The Essential Paul Simon available for a fiver, and many of the original albums also available very cheaply, I certainly wouldn't start from here.
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