When Ray Charles left Atlantic Records in 1960 and set up his own label Tangerine in partnership with ABC Paramount, the albums came thick and fast, and so did the hits. He also strayed onto other labels, including Impulse!, RCA, Columbia, Warner Bros, and Quincy Jones’s Qwest. This elegantly-produced 6 CD set is a first attempt to cherry pick the highlights of this work from his last four-and-a-bit decades, and – as a bonus CD – to present a hitherto unissued 1972 concert from Stockholm by Ray, his big band and the Raelets, with eight well-recorded tracks of the troupe at the very top of their game.

Some of the material on the first five discs has been quite recently reissued, including the full albums Dedicated to You, Genius+Jazz=Soul, Ray Charles and Betty Carter, and Modern Sounds in Country and Western, all of which have been reviewed in Jazzwise. Completists may prefer to have these entire albums, but for a whistlestop tour through Ray’s best-known songs from 1960 onwards, this new book-box is very well-planned, forming a perfect illustration to the discographical chapter in Michael Lydon’s excellent 1999 biography Ray Charles Man and Music, and coinciding neatly with his picks of selected highlights. Listening through all the material, it’s no wonder that Charles’s work sold so well, because he spans so many aspects of popular music. There are the ballads with orchestra, such as ‘Georgia On My Mind’, country songs such as ‘Ring of Fire’, straightahead jazz such as ‘Outskirts of Town’ (duetting with Clark Terry’s trumpet), and his own blues-soul hits such as ‘Hit the Road, Jack’.

Add to that the musical theatre collaboration with Cleo Laine on material from Porgy and Bess, not to mention a star-studded list of partnerships with other performers. By the time one reaches the final, inevitable encore of ‘I Got a Woman’ from the Stockholm set we’ve shared a uniquely broad-based musical journey through the second half of the 20th century, powered by Charles’ inimitable charisma, magnetism and his keyboard and vocal prowess. Hopefully this will be a curtain-raiser to a programme of further releases by the Ray Charles Foundation, which masterminded this True Genius set, with the prospect of more unissued material, and also more of the complete albums to come.