Smooth Grooves: Smooth Jazz Vol. 2

CD Details

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There wasn’t one smooth-jazz radio station in the United States when any of the 12 tracks included here were recorded. Yet, except for questionable selections by Dexter Wansel, Steps Ahead, and Stuff, the artist list here reads like a sampling of a radio playlist. It’s been suggested that smooth jazz began nearly a quarter of a century ago when saxophonist John Klemmer took Dave Grusin and Larry Carlton into a Los Angeles studio and began turning out soft jazz with long, lilting lines and mellowed accompaniment. Klemmer’s “Touch” is included here, as is music from other musicians who crossed over in the late 1970s and early ’80s to the pop and R&B markets regularly enough to record for major pop-record labels. In fact, Lee Ritenour’s “Countdown” comes from Rit, the same 1981 album on which he scored a top 15 pop single with “Is It You.” Grover Washington Jr.’s contribution to this compilation from the same year, “Come Morning,” is the title track on the follow-up to his platinum classic, Winelight. This CD starts off strong with the influential saxes of Washington, George Howard, and David Sanborn. Of all the classic music from the prolific Crusaders during this period, their “Standing Tall” is very likely the worst track from their worst album, and it’s definitely a programming error here. The remainder of Smooth Grooves, Volume 2 rounds out to a fair sampling of pioneering music that smooth-jazz radio programmers had to choose from when the genre gathered steam in the mid-1980s. –Mark Ruffin