Dinah Washington was accompanied by an orchestra organized and conducted by
Quincy Jones on this 1957 album, and she was singing to arrangements mostly written by the young bandleader, swing charts of pop standards by the likes of
Cole Porter,
George Gershwin, and
Duke Ellington. The result had much in common with the swing albums of
Frank Sinatra in the same period, especially because
Jones' arrangements were heavily influenced by
Billy May and
Nelson Riddle.
Sinatra's records were regarded as "pop, " of course, and
Washington's, at least when released on the EmArcy subsidiary of Mercury Records, as "jazz, " but her precise articulation and attention to lyrical meaning left little room for improvisation, and while
Jones allowed for brief solos from a band that included
Charlie Shavers,
Clark Terry,
Urbie Green, and
Milt Hinton, the jazz categorization was actually arbitrary. Whatever musical genre you assign it to, however, this is an excellent
Washington album. [For the 1998 reissue, Verve added seven bonus tracks recorded around the same time and with much the same personnel, though they were intended as singles and thus are inferior contemporary tunes. Often, however,
Washington sounds more comfortable and enthusiastic on these pop and R&B songs than she does on the standards.]