A handsome five-disc package of all things Fame, including the re-mastered albums Fame At Last, the Motown influenced Sweet Thing, the live Rhythm and Blues at the Flamingo and the big band extravaganza Sound Venture. There's a fulsome demos and rarities disc and an amply illustrated booklet including a wry interview with the man himself reflecting on those heady days. Like Jamie Cullum, Fame has fallen foul of a ridiculous ‘too jazz for pop, not jazz enough for jazz’ argument. And decades before Cullum, Fame was happy to say a plague on both your houses and carve out his own niche. The jazz influences were always there, as Val Kilmer recognised in a prescient feature cited in the booklet. Those influences, notably Basie, culminate in Sound Venture. That a 23 year old chose to create a big band album while the Beatles were at their height and his Blue Flames drummer had just joined Hendrix reveals a musician with a deep commitment to his own musical vision. But Fame's influence runs deeper than keeping the jazz flame alive in the popular market: as the Flamingo dates remind us, he was also joining the danceable side of Blue Note with the nascent African and Caribbean sounds of the era that would sow the diverse roots from which Brit Jazz of the 1980s would grow. There's nice irony that both Fame and Django Bates kicked off their careers in venues associated with Johnny Edgecombe. But enough of the musicology: just kick back and enjoy Fame's soul-edged vox and roogalating Hammond, not to mention his sock it to you sidemen.

Jazzwise spoke to Georgie Fame about the album

Jazz mattered, even starting out as a teenager?

Jazz was always there: hearing Johnny Parker's boogie-woogie on ‘Bad Penny Blues’ was an influence. Humph's sparse and muted trumpet, all that was great for a young whipper snapper. And all that fed into Fats Domino.

As we talk you're teaching at a jazz camp in Slovenia. But there was nothing like that for the young Clive Powell?

Like Clark Terry, mine was the University of the Road. After hours with the Blue Flames, there was always someone with a Dansette, older and more sophisticated; you'd listen and learn. Beauty and the Beat, Peggy Lee and George Shearing, I took so much from that and of course Ellington at Newport, live in 1956.

Then came the melting pot of The Flamingo, American GI's, the West Indian infl uence?

Those black American GI's were just the hippest guys in the world. They'd bring records and of course you couldn't get them anywhere else. We weren't considered jazzers but we played opposite some of the greats: Johnny Burch, Ronnie Ross and Tubby Hayes would drop in. But I wasn't allowed to play the piano, that was for the jazzers! We had to hire in an upright for me!

The Beatles are bigger than Jesus, your drummer's just joined Jimi Hendrix – and you make a big band album!

Everyone said big bands were dead, but I saw it as part of my musical education. Johnny Marshall, the original baritone with the Blue Flames introduced me to Harry South the pianist with Dick Morrissey's band and we became friends. And I loved that Lambert, Hendricks and Ross Sing A Song Of Basie album, which was the heart of Sound Venture. And a year later, I'm opening for Basie.

You loved jazz, but the jazz world didn't always love you?

I fell between stools. ‘Yeh Yeh’ kinda summed it up. The tenor solo was taken out of the single as ‘too jazz’. But Jon Hendricks rang me, wanted me to sing it with the Tubby Hayes arrangement, for his 70th birthday. But Wynton Marsalis didn't want it, not jazz enough! And it's based on a Mongo Santamaria instrumental, and that's Clark Terry and Coleman Hawkins on Hendricks’ recording, the credentials for that song are impeccable

And you're back at Ronnie's?

In November. I still make little raids. With Guy Barker's band. He was in my band for years. And it'll have my son James on drums, the first time he's played with a big band. We all keep on learning.