This latest release in Avid Jazz’s Five Classic Albums series is a superb 2-CD set featuring three albums by vocalist Jimmy Scott plus two from fellow vocalist Oscar Brown Jr, with original artwork, liner notes and personnel details. Scott’s first album recorded for the Savoy label, Very Truly Yours (1955), finds his inimitable phrasing, exquisite timing and that elusive feeling he conveyed of existential sorrow already fully formed, with exquisite takes on ‘Everybody Needs Somebody’, ‘Street of Dreams’, ‘Someone To Watch Over Me’ and more, with a brilliant band that includes bassist Charles Mingus and guitarist Mundell Lowe.

Released in 1960, just two years before his masterpiece Falling In Love Is Wonderful, the seven songs featured on The Fabulous Songs Of Jimmy Scott are all standouts, from a heart-wrenching ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child’ to an alluring ‘If You Are But A Dream’, the latter first recorded by Frank Sinatra in 1944. Highlights from If You Only Knew include the sorrowing ‘I’m Thru With Love’ and the fabulously full-throated opening of ‘Recess In Heaven’. The first two albums Oscar Brown, Jr. recorded for Columbia in the early 1960s, the classic debut Sin & Soul and the similarly outstanding Between Heaven and Hell, showcase both his brilliance as a lyricist and his singular way of delivering a song. On Sin & Soul we hear his lyrics to Nat Adderley’s ‘Work Song’, Bobby Timmons’ ‘Dat Dere’ and Mongo Santamaria’s ‘Afro-Blue’, plus the chilling portrayal of a slave auction in ‘Bid ’Em In’. Arranged and conducted by Ralph Burns and, on a brace of songs, Quincy Jones, Between Heaven and Hell includes Brown’s powerful setting of the Paul Laurence Dunbar poem ‘When Malindy Sings’ plus other memorable self-penned songs including ‘Hymn to Friday’.