Ella Fitzgerald and Billy Holiday are rightly considered today as two of the most influential jazz singers – and the third in this famous line-up is Sarah Lois Vaughan (*1924), fondly known as “Sassy”. Right at the beginning of her career, Sassy sang (and also played the piano!) in the orchestras led by Earl Hines and Billy Eckstein, but in 1945 she started on a career as a soloist in the main. Her recordings of predominantly slow, popular ballads – made over the five years (1949-1954) that she recorded for Columbia Records – resulted in her breakthrough. Sarah Vaughan had reached stardom. During her Mercury years (1954-1959), her fame grew and she had well and truly “arrived”. But she was a woman with two souls: on the one hand she worked with such full-blooded jazz musicians as Clifford Brown and Cannonball Adderley, and on the other hand she continued to record highly successful albums with “easy-listening” orchestras, such as Sassy, recorded in 1956 with Hal Mooney and his orchestra. Easy listening, however, certainly is not to be put on a par with shallowness, as is well proved by Mooney’s laid-back, tasteful arrangements which allow Sarah Vaughan once more to demonstrate just how capable she is of expressing the contrasting moods and varying atmospheres of each and every song. The range of her now fully mature voice, with its truly instrumental flexibility and versatility, will never cease to amaze.