Released in 1970, Just a Little Lovin' was the fourth (and last) studio album Carmen McRae cut for Atlantic Records in the late '60s/early '70s. The albums were for the most part a mix of pop and jazz songs with a decidedly pop angle. Just a Little Lovin' isn't too different, though it leans more toward the soulful end of the street. Producer Arif Mardin put McRae together with the Dixie Flyers studio band, backup singers extraordinaire the Sweet Inspirations, and an all-star horn section led by King Curtis, and then let her loose on the usual Beatles covers (a lifeless "Something," a very relaxed and sensual "Here, There and Everywhere," and a dramatic take on "Carry That Weight") and pop tunes like Jimmy Webb's "Didn't We" and Laura Nyro's "Goodbye Joe"…

Locked out of the singles charts for the past seven years, Shirley Bassey finally returned with this collection of "contemporary" standards, including her British Top Five single "Something." (Bassey, who first heard the song when Peggy Lee sang it, apparently didn't even know it was a Beatles tune until just before recording it.) To parallel the modern material, Johnny Harris' arrangements add an upfront electric bass and hang-loose drumkit to the heavy strings and brass. Of course, Bassey was never a jazz singer, so she makes the transition from traditional pop to contemporary rock with an ease more comparable to Barbra Streisand than Peggy Lee. There are a few jazzy rock standards ("Light My Fire," "Spinning Wheel," "Something") plus plenty of latter-day show tunes ("Easy to Be Hard," "What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life,") and a few '60s vocal pieces ("The Sea and Sand," "My Way," "Yesterday When I Was Young")…

This three-disc compilation features many of the Mills Brothers' best tracks. Although Golden Greats does not cover the vocal group's whole career, it still competes well with the definitive Mills Brothers: The Anthology (1931-1968) and perhaps represents them better.

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…