Sarah Vaughan - Original Album Series (2015)

Five famous albums by Sassy, starring her distinctive voice, with its velvet lining down which her contralto plunges used to dive, and up which her soprano runs used to soar - ever exciting, ever apt. Best of the five is the album with Count Basie and his band - the pell-mell frolic into Perdido, the first track, tells you this is going to be super-duper jazz for voice and big band. Sonny Payne was on drums - driving masterfully a band of the count's best men, not least trumpeter-arranger Thad Jones. The saccharine choice of Little Man, You've Had a Busy Day as sign-off can just about be forgiven.

However, it's harder to bless the work of the other two Joneses involved. Jimmy Jones, whose writing for strings is banal, was the arranger and conductor on the album Dreamy. Every time the bows engage with the cat-gut, the listener winces. On the album You're Mine You, that over-rated arranger Quincy Jones indulges his belief that every instrument at his command should be employed intrusively, loudly and at every opportunity. Only when, for a few numbers, he appears to have grasped the notion that less is more does the album reach the heights that the singer touches - ditto Dreamy.

Less is more - indeed, as is well demonstrated on the After Hours album, where Sassy is accompanied only by guitarist Mundell Lowe and bassist George Duvivier, two sensitive gentlemen of jazz who do a fine job. Mind you, their credit on the album sleeve occurs deep in the tiny liner notes. Like all the CD albums in this set, the back cover is a much shrunken reproduction of the back of the original LP sleeve. Get your magnifying glass ready.

So, there are imperfections, disappointments here, arising one suspects from the urge by record companies of her day to make more profit out of Sarah by steering her away from outright jazz performance and towards the middle of the road. The old problem for jazzers: When can we play hot for a living?

But consider that you can get five albums - three of them superlative for let's include The Divine One - without putting a big dent in your wallet, that you're offered a tour of some of the best rarities of the Great American Songbook and that you're hearing a distinctive voice it is our privilege to know and understand. "I was always much more infuenced by horns than by vocalists," said Sarah. It shows - and what a supple horn of a voice, guided by a nimble intelligence, she brought to music.