For his debut album on the legendary Verve label, musician and actor Harry Connick Jr constructs, conducts and arranges a 13-track collection dedicated to one of the greatest songsmiths of the 20th century, Cole Porter. Featuring his long-time touring band plus horns and strings, the album blazes into life with a coruscating ‘Anything Goes’, while chattering clarinets and muted trumpets light up ‘I Love Paris’. The harmonic sophistication and intriguing versification of ‘I Concentrate On You’ has seen it covered by a host of contemporary vocalists including Dianne Reeves, Patricia Barber and Stacey Kent, and the version heard here lingers long in the memory. Following a glacial ‘All Of You’, Connick Jr flexes his impressive piano chops on ‘Just One Of Those Things’, before uncorking a stunning orchestration of ‘In The Still Of The Night’. If the prelude to ‘Begin the Beguine’ possesses an almost player-piano-like feel, Porter’s sybaritic qualities come strongly to the fore during a gorgeous take on ‘You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To’. A beautifully paced ‘You Do Something To Me’, Porter’s first Broadway hit, brings this fine album to a moving close.