But Beautiful: The Best of Shirley Horn on Verve

1	I Just Found Out About Love 2:27
2	You Won't Forget Me 7:10
3	You Don't Know Me 2:58
4	The Great City 2:05
5	Fever 4:45
6	If You Love Me 6:04
7	A Time for Love 6:45
8	Come Dance with Me 2:51
9	Nice 'N' Easy 4:53
10	But Beautiful 4:42
11	Here's to Life 5:37
12	Jelly, Jelly Live / previously unreleased / Bonus Track 4:54
13	Loads of Love Live / previously unreleased / Bonus Track 3:07
14	I Didn't Know What Time It Was Live / previously unreleased / Bonus Track 4:43

Barnes & Noble

It is telling that Diana Krall, an acknowledged devotee, selected the tracks and penned the notes for an earlier Verve highlight compilation of the oeuvre of singer-pianist Shirley Horn, who died earlier this year, not long after the release of this album. Horn’s ability to alchemize any song into a soul-catching message, to pare lyrics to their essence with pitch-perfect phrasing shaded with a dark blues timbre -- in short, to inspire her listeners to dream -- made her one of the preeminent singers of her generation, one who shares a short list with the likes of Abbey Lincoln, Freddy Cole, and Mark Murphy. The program here, chosen for diversity in tempo and instrumentation, begins in 1963 (“The Great City,” done for Mercury); cherry-picks from most of Horn's ‘80s and ‘90s Verve dates (with the exception of I Remember Miles and You’re My Thrill); and concludes with three “bonus tracks” recorded at a January 2005 engagement at Manhattan’s Au Bar (Roy Hargrove appears on “Jelly, Jelly,” a risqué Billy Eckstine vehicle, and ”I Didn’t Know What Time It Was”) that are new additions to Horn’s discography, transforming this best-of recording from a nice introduction for newbies into a document that even Horn completists will want to own. Ted Panken

All Music Guide

When vocalist/pianist Shirley Horn resurfaced after a long spell away from the recording studio and signed with Verve Records in 1987, the jazz world at large discovered what many of Horn's devoted followers already knew: that she is a huge talent and one of the great jazz singers to follow in the footsteps of legends like Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday. On her records for Verve, Horn never dazzles with flawless technique or stunning vocal tricks. Instead, she enthralls the listener with her intimate delivery and her understated yet almost visceral emotional power. Since that first record in 1987, she has released a string of good-to-excellent records, and But Beautiful: The Best of Shirley Horn on Verve compiles some of the finest moments from them, including the lovely "You Won't Forget About Me," which features Miles Davis on trumpet, maybe the best take on "Fever" since Peggy Lee's, the achingly slow and torchy "But Beautiful," and the lightly swinging "Come and Dance with Me," a track that shows that while Horn's main strength is ballads she also can swing like nobody's biz. The disc also gives a tiny taste of Horn's '60s sound with the inclusion of "The Great City" from 1963's Shirley Horn with Horns and has three bonus tracks recorded live in 2005 with a tight combo that show Horn has a surplus of style and class. Tim Sendra