This is excellent Boz Scaggs. His reprise of oldies is not only technically better but the renderings are far more articulate and wonderfully sung and orchestrated than the originals. Boz's voice is now mature and his styling is better than ever. If you're a Boz fan and liked the originals, you'll love the new renditions of your old favorites. Great album.

I don't mean to sound jaded, but a greatest hits album usually means that the artist is either coasting, past their prime, or is often a bit washed up and needs some bucks, so they dig into their past glory and cash in with a greatest hits disk while people still remember them... Ha ha! (Needless to say, I don't own much greatest hits stuff.)

Not Boz. He is none of the above, no coasting on past glory here. It reminds me that a lot of the best artists of our times are continually pumping out new work and evolving, getting sweeter and more in touch with that magical something that translates into music that is simple, yet sophisticated, like "I just go"; innocent, yet somehow a bit roguish like "Miss Sun." Cool. The difference here is that he has not gotten stale, diminished or (horror of horrors), become a caricature of his former self, like so many artists who get lazy, uninspired, or simply didn't have enough talent to go the distance, as they say.

It seems to me that music sometimes has the ability to reach a part of us where words are a bit inadequate, like all inspired art. I won't even go there, because I'm not a musician, but do have a serious appreciation of life, and by natural extension, art.

The most pleasant surprise with these disks is that the body of work is really quite disparate, yet he links them with a common style and feel that blends them into a cohesive body that goes together and becomes something symbiont. Let us be honest here, some of his work was a bit fluffy and got slingshot onto the scene because of the disco stuff in the mid-1970's. He took some of his lightweight stuff and pumped some serious juice into them, and many of them are actually better than the originals. He took the least common denomenator and upped the equation.

The irony is that the pulse is less driving than some of the originals, like "Lowdown," but it blends seamlessly into something more bluesy and complex like "Ask Me 'Bout Nothin' But The Blues," or "Loan me a dime." It seems to me that one of the things that really great albums have in common is the ability to make individual pieces an obvious part of a greater whole. Boz pulled it off with a greatest hits album, which is what I still find truely amazing. I mean look--a bluesy "Runnin Blue" goes hand in hand with the more pop inspired "Jojo," and they fit... Here's to the ability to keep on evolving...

This is an outstanding CD. I've listed to Boz evolve vocally since his Steve Miller days and he's at his best here. He's taken hits from most of his past records and performs them in this live concert version and made them even better. This is a 2-CD set, but I wish there more. I also bought the DVD of this concert, which is excellent, and includes backstage footage of Boz and the band and a photo gallery. Boz is a truly gifted artist and I would recommend this to everyone.