"day by Day"

When Doris Day freed herself from those cotton candy films she appeared in, where her singing for the most part was limited to cute novelty tunes, she showed that she could successfully sink her vocal teeth into some solid standard material. The LPs compiled on this CD come from the late '50s, when she was recording for Columbia with backing from an orchestra headed by Paul Weston. The songs fall into two categories. The first are those where Weston employed a large, sugary string section. The far more interesting tracks are those where the strings were held out and Day was backed by a dance band group with some jazz personages present…

What Every Girl Should Know (1960). When Doris Day entered the recording studio to make her annual LP in December 1959, she was arguably at her peak as a movie star, having seen the release two months earlier of Pillow Talk, the first of the frothy comedies she would make in the late '50s and early '60s. But as a recording artist, she seemed to be in trouble. Since 1957, when both Day by Day and the soundtrack to The Pajama Game, in which she starred, made the Top Ten, she had not cracked the album charts, failing with Day by Night (1958) and Cuttin' Capers (1959). Unfortunately, What Every Girl Should Know was not the album to reverse this pattern. The concept, as expressed in Robert Wells and David Holt's 1954 title song, was the offering of advice to females, much of it, as it happened, written by men…

Forty-two songs cut between November 1940 and August 1946, and the perfect companion to Bear Family's It's Magic box set – anyone who's been even tempted to own that will have to get this more modestly priced precursor to that material. Day's period singing with Les Brown is, today, regarded with a degree of love and affection reserved for Ella Fitzgerald's era with Chick Webb, or Frank Sinatra's work with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey. Yet Sony Music's own releases devoted to Doris Day and Les Brown spread the music around to several different CDs, and suffered from sound that, today, seems substandard. These newly remastered tracks, offered in chronological order, including one previously unissued song ("Are You Still in Love with Me"), not only display a far richer, warmer sound, but have been presented with the kind of care that is normally reserved for the best parts of a label's catalog – which these sides definitely are. Day's voice during this period (she was 16 when she cut her first sides with Brown) was an astonishingly expressive instrument.

Follow-up volumes appeared in 1993 and 1996, extending the time period to 1979 and with additional songs from the 1972-76 period, available on cassette or CD (ALL 25 volumes were issued in both formats). Each volume has twelve songs. Despite the greater capacity of compact discs, the running time of each of the volumes is no longer than the limit of vinyl records in the 1970s, from 38 to 45 minutes long.

Considering that "Day By Day"has been out since 1988 , it still sounds as great as music that's being released today.Strongly recommended for all smooth jazz fans.