VA - Café Roma Vol. 2 - An Italian Jazz & Lounge Experience [2CD Set] (2004)

Though this budget-priced two-disc compilation is billed as an Italian jazz & lounge experience, you'd be hard-pressed to guess that it has anything to do with Italy based on the music itself, most of which sounds much more Brazilian or Cuban than anything else. A few tracks are actually sung in Italian and credited to Italian musicians, but since a bunch of others are sung in Portuguese, you have to really be paying attention to catch the linguistic switch. Still, what matters here isn't nationality; what matters is whether the music grooves, and that it does. Everything has a jazzy, swinging feel and just a faint whiff of European movie soundtracks from the 1960s, and even if regional favorites like Nicola Conte and Giacomo Bondi are unfamiliar names here in the States, no one with a pulse will be able to resist the hip-swaying charms of much of this program. Among the highlights are a fine adaption of the jazz standard What a Difference a Day Makes, performed by Dynamic 4, and the invigorating (if misspelled) Cosmic Odissey by Spacestar. Things do occasionally get a bit soft in the middle, as on Vibraphile's enervatingly smooth By Night, but for the most part this is stuff that will liven up any party.