No, you're not in
Creed Taylor country yet, but you might as well be, for many of the ingredients that would garnish
Benson's albums with
Taylor are already present in this often enjoyable prototype. The immediate goal was to groom
Benson as the next
Wes Montgomery (who was about to leave Verve) -- and so he covers hit tunes of the day ("Sunny," "Along Comes Mary," "Groovin'"), playing either with a big band plus voices or a neat quintet anchored by
Herbie Hancock, and the sound is contoured to give his guitar a warm mellow ambience. But the eclectic
Benson is his own man, as his infectious repeated-interval rhythm trademark tells us on his self-composed title track, and despite
Tom McIntosh's mostly lame arrangements,
George's work is always tasty and irresistibly melodic. ~ Richard S. Ginell