My Amazon Reviews: Sade "The Best of Sade"

Stronger Than Pride
5 Out of 5 Stars

You know you're in the presence of a unique artist when radio stations around the USA not only built a format around your music, but named the format after a line in one of your songs. The "Quiet Storm" format of soft jazz and sophisticated R'n'B began to appear in the 80's when programmers so fell in love with Sade (and other artists like Anita Baker) that they built entire programming menus around the music. This 1994 Best of Sade shows exactly why her sound has never been equaled by her many imitators.

Only four albums into her career (and with only two more released since), Sade's impossibly smooth voice was part of what identified her music, but there was so much more. Her three piece band, musician/songwriters Andrew Hale, Stuart Matthewman, and Paul S. Denman, played a slick but authentic sounding mixture of latin-jazz, lite funk and slinky R'n'B that sounded like nothing else in the market at that time. Sade's ever so cool voice recalled Billie Holiday and Nina Simone; it wasn't long before she was tagged a diva in the making. They moved with ease between the pop of "Smooth Operator" and "Hang On To Your Love" and the brassy force of "Is It A Crime."

This collection does a good job of balancing the band's mix of songs from the four albums, with an added bonus of Sade's cover of Curtis Mayfield's "Please Send Me Someone to Love" from the Philadelphia soundtrack. It's also worth noting that Sade has never felt a need to bend their music to prevailing genres or trends; this is a best of that plays through with the consistency of a new album. Still smoking with the sensuality of the first time you heard Diamond Life, The Best of Sade is music that has lost none of its allure with the passing of time.