With Charlie Wood’s sumptuous arrangements completely enveloping the magnificent voice of Jacqui Dankworth, this hour-long collection of 12 songs is one of the year’s most captivating vocal jazz offerings.

It opens in the most dazzling fashion with one of the great interpretations of the Carroll Coates classic, ‘London By Night’, a song famously covered by Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and others.

Dankworth’s self-professed love of Brazilian music comes strongly to the fore with ‘So Many Stars’ by Sérgio Mendes – taken at the most deliciously languid tempo and featuring a gorgeous alto solo from Sammy Mayne – plus an outstanding take on Ivan Lins’ ‘Love Dance’, heard here with Paul Williams’ English lyric.

There’s a gorgeous, widescreen, brass-fuelled take on ‘Baubles, Bangles and Beads’, while Dankworth’s incredibly mellifluous timbre is heard to moving effect in Jacques Brel’s ‘If You Go Away’ and the Michel Legrand/Alan and Marilyn Bergman-penned title track.

From its dancing, tintinnabulating piano accompaniment and impressionistic orchestral arrangement, ‘On Raglan Road’ – which marries the Patrick Kavanagh poem with the traditional Irish song ‘The Dawning of the Day’ – is a standout, as is Dankworth’s infinitely touching, self-penned ballad ‘Will You Wait for Me?’. Elsewhere, we’re treated to a fabulous brace of songs from the 1944 musical On the Town featuring music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Betty Comden/Adolph Green, a joyous ‘Lucky to Be Me’ plus an inventive, gear-changing account of ‘Some Other Time’.