Before she signed to Atlantic Records in 1967, achieving huge commercial success and earning the honorific title ‘The Queen of Soul’, Aretha Franklin had a six-year period with Columbia Records during which she not only recorded her first secular album, Aretha: With The Ray Bryant Combo, but also became the darling of the jazz club circuit, picked as the new star female vocalist in Down Beat magazine's International Jazz Critics Poll. This release brings together the second and third of Aretha's albums for Columbia, The Electrifying Aretha Franklin and The Tender, the Moving, the Swinging Aretha Franklin, both dating from 1962. Conducted and arranged by Richard Wess and featuring a stellar cast of musicians including Oliver Nelson (sax), Mundell Lowe and Bucky Pizzarelli (guitar), Wynton Kelly and Tommy Flanagan (piano) and Jimmy Cobb (drums), the former ranges from the dramatic onward surge of ‘Rough Lover’ to the exuberant sermonising of ‘Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive’. Highlights from the latter include the self-penned ‘Without the One You Love’ to a searingly powerful ‘Lover Come Back to Me’.