1. Stardust
2. Small Fry
3. How Little We Know
4. The Nearness Of You
5. Georgia On My Mind
6. Skylark

1. One Morning In May
2. I Get Along Without You Very Well
3. Memphis In June
4. I Guess It Was You All The Time
5. Blue Orchids
6. Rocking Chair

Recording first published 1962

This is a happy pairing. Hoagy Carmichael is one of that elite handful of popular composers who lavish thought and skill on every tune they write. Matt Monro is a member of that possibly even smaller handful of singers who put imagination and craftsmanship into every performance. And both singer and performer have been treated to versatile sympathy at the hands of the arranger/conductor, Johnnie Spence. What, at this stage, can one say about Matt Monro? At the risk of going over old ground, let us first of all look at the unusual aspects of his career. Let us puzzle once again over the reasons for the long delay in his recognition. Remember how, when he first recorded in the middle 1950's, a gimmickyhungry publicity machine latched on to the fact that Matt had been a truck and bus driver? They photographed him in his cap, you may recall, and in the scramble to put across the "singing bus driver" angle the emphasis somehow settled on what he had been rather than what he was. He wasn't a singing anything: he was a Singer. True, popular entertainment of the time was more a matter of electrical engineering than ballad singing, but he could have been more sympathetically represented. The only point that matters about all this now is that with these early echoes in their ears, most people even today don't realise that this man is the true professional. He reads music on sight, wastes no time at all at sessions, is supremely critical of himself, and knows quality when he hears it. Most of the tracks on this record were done at late-night Sunday sessions (like film-stars, recording work hours that would have the average man on strike), between the Saturday and Monday performances of his Weymouth summer show. Yet the voice is as relaxed, the approach is as assured as if he'd had a week to prepare each one. He even had an appropriate name. Look in your dictionary. The word "matt" is normally defined as "smooth, but not glossy". That's it..................