Before she achieved huge commercial success after signing to Atlantic Records in 1967, the ‘Queen of Soul’ had a six-year period with Columbia Records during which she not only recorded Aretha with the Ray Bryant Combo, her first secular album, but also became the darling of the jazz club circuit, picked as the new star female vocalist in Down Beat magazine's International Jazz Critics Poll. Produced by John Hammond, whose work ranged from Bessie Smith's final recordings to Billie Holiday's first, Franklin was just 18 when she waxed this outstanding album in NYC. From a gutsy ‘Sweet Lover’ and an exuberant ‘Who Needs You?’ to the churchy take on ‘Are You Sure?’ (from the 1960 Broadway musical The Unsinkable Molly Brown), the beauty, range and power of Franklin's voice, at such an incredibly young age, is astonishing. While the album's title might be gilding the lily slightly – the ‘combo’ was in fact a pickup group assembled for the recording – the pairing with pianist Bryant proved especially apposite, not least due to their shared church background. There are no less than nine bonus tracks, four of which (‘Precious Lord Parts 1 and 2’, ‘Never Grow Old’ and ‘You Grow Closer’) were recorded live in 1956 at the New Bethel Baptist Church, Detroit – the church where her father C. L. Franklin was minister and where she began her career singing gospel.