Chris Craft is a great one here - beautifully simple and straightforward jazz vocals, served up at a level that few other singers can match! The album's one of our favorites from Connor's classic years with Atlantic - as it's got a mellow, moody approach that's filled with the darker tones that first caught our ears on Chris' earliest recordings for Bethlehem. Instrumentation here is mostly small combo - arranged by Stan Free, and featuring Free on piano, Bobby Jaspar on flute, Mundell Lowe on guitar, George Duvivier on bass, and Ed Shaughnessy on drums.

Cut as the Beatles were disintegrating and released shortly before the group's final album, Let It Be, Ringo Starr's debut solo album was a collection of pre-rock standards dating from the 1920s to the '50s, sung over orchestral tracks arranged by everyone from fellow Beatle Paul McCartney and Bee Gee Maurice Gibb to jazz veterans Quincy Jones and Oliver Nelson. Starr brought a good-natured, nearly humorous tone to his vocals, perhaps because he wasn't trying to compete with the classic pop stylists most identified with these songs, but only to express his nostalgic affection for the material. Coming more than a decade before the fad for standards albums by rock-era pop stars like Linda Ronstadt, the album was taken not as a career move, but as a highly eccentric and expensive novelty of a kind only Beatles could afford to indulge. In retrospect, it remains harmlessly charming, if unexceptional.

One of Mel Torme's hippest albums of the 60s - and a strong shift towards more swinging material after some of his mellower work for other labels! There's a bit of electric piano in the mix, and plenty of that Atlantic records pop/soul jazz approach - a take on soul jazz that's similar to tunes by Herbie Mann at the same time, but with vocals. The whole thing's filled with greatly grooving tracks - and it draws no small influence from Jon Hendricks' excellent work of the time!

Bolton Swings Sinatra: The Second Time Around is an album by Michael Bolton, produced by Alex Christensen, arranged and conducted by Chris Walden. Bolton records songs originally made notable by Frank Sinatra.

What Every Girl Should Know (1960). When Doris Day entered the recording studio to make her annual LP in December 1959, she was arguably at her peak as a movie star, having seen the release two months earlier of Pillow Talk, the first of the frothy comedies she would make in the late '50s and early '60s. But as a recording artist, she seemed to be in trouble. Since 1957, when both Day by Day and the soundtrack to The Pajama Game, in which she starred, made the Top Ten, she had not cracked the album charts, failing with Day by Night (1958) and Cuttin' Capers (1959). Unfortunately, What Every Girl Should Know was not the album to reverse this pattern. The concept, as expressed in Robert Wells and David Holt's 1954 title song, was the offering of advice to females, much of it, as it happened, written by men…

As the repository of the earliest phase of Frank Sinatra's solo career, 1943-1952, Columbia Records is usually thought to be at a disadvantage against the more accomplished work the singer recorded for Capitol Records and his own Reprise imprint. But in two albums released on the same day in 2003, Sinatra Sings Cole Porter and Sinatra Sings Gershwin, Columbia's Legacy division expands on its studio recordings of Sinatra by borrowing airchecks from the collection of Charles L. Granata, and thereby improves its holdings. Sinatra would not seem at first blush to be the ideal interpreter of Porter, if only because his rough-and-tumble background is always visible beneath his careful intonation, while Porter's lyrics are redolent of wealth and comic condescension. But Sinatra sang "Night and Day" in his first solo session in 1942 and went on to perform Porter throughout his career, often achieving near-definitive readings. The ground on which they met was intellectual rather than social: Porter was at heart a wit, and Sinatra understood the jokes, while emphasizing what emotional content there was, giving it a greater sincerity than the songwriter might have intended. This collection effectively mixes a bunch of studio recordings with previously unreleased radio performances that find Sinatra ranging over many different Porter moods.

While Collectables Records often has been able to pair complementary albums in its series of discount-priced two-fer reissues of Doris Day's catalog, there are also stray LPs that don't sound like any of their siblings and so can only be teamed in mismatched combinations. Such a set of non-identical twins is found on this CD containing Love Him! and Show Time. Love Him!, which arrived after a lengthy break in Day's recording career in the winter of 1963-1964, found her working under the aegis of her 21-year-old son, Columbia Records producer Terry Melcher, who attempted to update and broaden his mother's musical approach, having her cut recent songs associated with Elvis Presley plus selections from the country and R&B charts…

While pop music sells in copious quantities at the time of release, its cyclical and transitory nature means that many hits just don't come around again in the reissue sweepstakes. Enter Eric Records, an oldies label, to help rectify the situation with this set of compilations, bringing together 20 big non-rock & roll hits from the 1950s. A quick perusal of the stars of this collection (Kitty Kallen, Mitch Miller, Doris Day, Al Martino, Tony Martin, Frankie Laine) will give you a strong idea of the musical content, with only Lonnie Donegan's "Rock Island Line" bearing the tiniest resemblance to rock & roll. But the set also includes delightful one-offs by the Tarriers, Cyril Stapleton, the Four Coins, and Somethin' Smith and the Redheads. Oldies but goodies for the over-50 crowd.

Recorded in November 1962, this album marks the first official release of the legendary Greenwich Village Nightclub shows and includes 24 newly mixed performances from the original master tapes in Barbra’s personal collection. With the release of this album, Columbia Records celebrates 60 years of making records with Barbra Streisand, the artist with the longest continuous catalog on the label and the only artist - male or female - on any label to chart #1 albums in every decade since the 1960s.

Ever since 1978's Stardust, standards albums have been part of Willie Nelson's arsenal, but 2018's My Way presents a twist on this shopworn tradition: it's designed as a tribute to Frank Sinatra. Album-long tributes to Sinatra aren't uncommon – Bob Dylan devoted much of the 2010s to recording a series of tributes to him – but My Way stands apart from the pack by capturing both the rakish charm of the Chairman of the Board and Nelson's sly elegance. Nelson balances standards from the Great American Songbook ("A Foggy Day," "Blue Moon," "Night and Day," "Young at Heart") with songs written with Sinatra in mind ("Fly Me to the Moon," "Summer Wind," "It Was a Very Good Year," "My Way"), which brings My Way closer to the essence of Frank Sinatra than Dylan's stylized saloon records.