Devotees of Mildred Bailey could once obtain all her recordings in chronological order on the now defunct French Classics series. There was also a Columbia collection of her recordings for that label, but now Acrobat’s new 3-CD box has arrived as a welcome gap-filler, giving an overview of her work from slightly stilted singing with early bands, including those of Eddie Lang, Frankie Trumbauer and Paul Whiteman, to her much looser, more relaxed work with an excellent cross section of swing era stars.

She comes into her own in the early 1930s, both with ‘Heat Wave’ (sung with the Casa Loma Orchestra) and a group of sides with the Dorsey Brothers, including the hits ‘Lazy Bones’ and “Doin’ The Uptown Lowdown’.

From then on, via some hard-swinging studio sessions with Teddy Wilson, the bulk of the material is either with her husband Red Norvo’s bands, or specially assembled studio groups under her own name.

She was working in interracial contexts early on (notably with Jimmie Noone) and the best of her small groups continue this trend, with Artie Shaw rubbing shoulders with Ben Webster, or Roy Eldridge providing most of his contemporaneous Chicagoan band to back her in 1937. The liner notes suggest Bailey was a ‘better’ singer than Billie Holiday (quoting the writer Francis Davis, although rather oddly referring to him as ‘she’) but a comparison of Bailey’s unemotional version of ‘Lover Come Back To Me’ with Billie’s various recordings shows that Mildred lacks Lady Day’s instinctive involvement. On ‘I Cried For You’, Bailey sensibly took a different course from Billie’s, melding into John Kirby’s tightly organized sextet, despite guest star Norvo’s ghastly xylophone solo.

The highlight of the box is a 1939 session with Mary Lou Williams on piano, plus guitarist Floyd ‘Wonderful’ Smith trading phrases with Bailey. They work brilliantly on ‘Gulf Coast Blues’, and a medium-paced ‘There’ll Be Some Changes Made’ which bucks the trend for adopting a driving tempo. Overall, this is a valuable and well put-together anthology, that gives a good rounded portrait of Bailey – and sitting almost dead-centre among the 73 tracks is her signature song ‘Rockin’ Chair’.