As a double-disc set, Tina Turner's latest best-of falls between 1991's too-short Simply the Best and 1994's slapdash three-CD box The Collected Recordings: Sixties to Nineties

. This one includes 1993's inferior rendition of "Proud Mary" (from the movie What's Love Got to Do With It) and gives short shrift to Ike and Tina Turner's 1960s and 1970s catalog. Since her 1984 solo breakthrough, Private Dancer, this consummate performer and soul-rock icon has recorded one other album worthy of her gutsy delivery (1996's Wildest Dreams, which yields five selections here) and several uneven discs, most of them with dated production. All the Best collects single edits and a few full-length versions from those albums, adds a few duets and soundtrack strays, and tacks on three respectable new cuts: "Open Arms" recalls her Eighties-hit heyday, and "Complicated Disaster" and "Something Special" supply densely arranged contemporary slickness. Yet the collection fails to deliver what its title claims. Turner deserves better.

“All Along the Watchtower”

Jimi Hendrix got hold of Bob Dylan's early John Wesley Harding tapes and in late 1967 recorded a version of "All Along the Watchtower" with the Experience in London. Dissatisfied with that first development, Hendrix brought those tapes with him to New York in early 1968 when he began work on Electric Ladyland. Eddie Kramer, Hendrix's engineer at the time, told Rolling Stone that Hendrix "was still looked upon by his basically white audience as the mammoth black guitar hero. There was a constant fight within him to expand himself." Hendrix's successful take on Dylan's work has long been recognized by the songwriter. "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way," Dylan wrote in the liner notes to his Biograph box set. "Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."