This Gerry Mulligan Quartet was a very different beast to its earlier, and more celebrated, Chet Baker-featured incarnation. For one thing, Art Farmer was a player whose previous playing associations – Horace Silver and Lionel Hampton – had given him considerable muscle to go alongside all the lyricism. For another, the leader had now shed some of his fashionable reserve for a gutsier, more-free-blown extroversion. Thus, when the band revisits its early ‘hit’ ‘My Funny Valentine’ on these sessions – half of which were originally issued under the baritonist’s name on Columbia – you get a genuine update, not a pallid, cool-school rerun. Elsewhere on the album things are positively hot: try the gospelly ‘News From Blueport’ or the fiendishly complex ‘As Catch Can’. When they want to do delicate, Farmer and Mulligan do so with utter charm, with ‘What Is There To Say?’ – which gave the Columbia LP its original title – becoming a four-minute masterpiece in which subtle scoring (listen out for Crow’s arco bass) frame Farmer at his most moving.

To bulk out the playing time, EJC have added some radio transcriptions of the same band (including a fun ‘Walkin’ Shoes’) and two further items with Art Pepper et al. from the dreadfully time-locked movie The Subterraneans in which Mulligan played a priest (Never seen it? Then don’t!). Happily, he also played the baritone too, but the real meat here is the ex-Columbia material. Quite why EJC have now given Farmer co-billing I can’t quite fathom. Actually, I can – but if I tell you I’d only be repeating myself. Go buy!