Of the four albums here, only one, Sings Fred Astaire, would qualify as an out-and-out jazz album, with Tormé and the Marty Paich Dek-Tette on top form. When Herb Geller takes off on alto during a romping up-tempo ‘The Way You Look Tonight’, ushering in some nimble valve trombone from Enevoldsen, it's an exciting counterpart to the perfectly phrased and enunciated vocal.

Equally, Paich calls off the troops on ‘Cheek To Cheek’ and Tormé sings a swinging half chorus to just bass and drums accompaniment, before more sizzling saxophone solos from Geller and Montrose, plus Candoli's sparkling trumpet. Paich loves to weave little contrapuntal figures into his instrumental statements of the tunes, the brass and reeds of his 10-piece band offset against one another.

Unfortunately the other albums, It's a Blue World, California Suite, and Back in Town, have far fewer jazz moments. Despite quite a varied repertoire, somehow the charts and the polished, urbane vocal delivery manage to make all the songs on It's a Blue World sound extremely similar, which is quite an achievement, given that – for example – Ellington's ‘I Got It Bad’ and Van Heusen's ‘Polka Dots and Moonbeams’ started out as very different from each other!

There are some truly excruciating vocal group passages on the later two albums, which are neatly described in Joe Muranyi's liner note as being in ‘the jazz-pop idiom’. So as a collection, this doesn’t come close to the variety and skill on show in Tormé's later work with George Shearing, but Sings Fred Astaire makes the set worthwhile, because it is, as Muranyi says, “quite a record”!