The 1961-1962 Marty Paich Sessions.

This is a superb collection of big –belting show tunes and ballads, done as only Sammy can do. It’s all about energy, sophisticated phrasing and a deep sensitivity to the lyric that allows the great man to refashion some very familiar material and suddenly make it sound fresh and exciting. Track after track we get to hear an interpretive master looking for what makes each song work. This is no lounge slicker act but an artist who is trying to produce music that is highly personal and as a result, deeply moving on occasion. The contribution that Marty Paich makes with arrangements and his group of assembled musicians (who provide some rather tasty if fleeting solos) cannot be underestimated. This is a partnership that is greater than the sum of its parts.Plenty of great tracks here. My favourites include an awe-inspiring ‘Gonna Build a Mountain’, ‘Let There Be Love’ and ‘Lush Life’, but you will have your own. Interesting sleeve notes and great remastered sound make for a great value and easy to recommend, package.

At my age I'm hard on my way of becoming the man who has everything, and since one rare artist was yet conspicuously missing from my collection, I recently bought an older Sepia CD featuring Sammy Davis, admittedly after first having my interest aroused by a newspaper article on how Davis had outshone Sinatra during a Dutch tour in the eighties. I hithertofore had given Sammy Davis a miss thinking that he was a bit of an also-ran, lifting on Ol' Blue Eyes' coat tails, a good all round entertainer with an unquenchable penchant for clowning and impersonating ("Tourette's Syndrome set to music", Will Friedwald said of his antics), but not much else. The Sepia CD, containing two complete albums from the mid-to-late fifties, openend my eyes, so when at German online seller JPC I saw this attractively priced twofer, the order button was pressed and voilà, two days later this little gem fell on my doormat. And oh my word, how could I never before have noticed how great a singer this diminutive guy was! Just randomly picking some tracks on disc I was hit like a ton of bricks by Climb Every Mountain, which towards the end had me in tears, my family looking on in mild surprise. And Marty Paich, no slouch himself, had me in stitches with his spoof on Guy Lombardo in Back in Your Own Backyard. And so this collection abounds with delightful surprises. True, when Davis cuts loose, ragging the scale and doing his Tourette-bit, he easily gets on one's nerves, but these instances are rare here. I trust Paich and a sensible producer must have seen to that.A fellow reviewer on Amazon.com had some caveats concerning production standards on some of the tracks (the singles and one promo-single), but these are truly minor quibbles. We are talking about recordings of 55-year vintage, so not all may be as perfect as we have come to expect of modern productions (and even then balance etc. may not always be the bee's knees). It is obviously a work of love, with high-quality booklet and photos, complete discographical info, extensive liner notes, even the original liner notes, where available, of the original Reprise LPs. To get, at this price, 2.5 hours' worth of one of America's greatest singers of the Great American Songbook at the apex of his game, is a wonderful surprise for a man who thought he had seen and heard almost everything. Thanks, Sammy, for putting me straight.