If ever a 5-CD set were devised to act as the curtain raiser for the recently-issued True Genius 6-CD set on Tangerine (reviewed in November’s Jazzwise), this is it. The Tangerine box starts in 1960 and covers Ray’s later years whereas this one finishes in 1962, just as he’s really broken through to a mass album market. There’s a tiny overlap in the final two discs here with the opening of the Tangerine box, mainly with the accompanying bands directed by Quincy Jones and Marty Paich, but these Acrobat discs – all remastered in about the best quality the originals allow – chart Ray Charles’s career from his original Nat King Cole style trio to his first regular band with horns, which gradually mutates into a full big band. It’s fascinating to catch glimpses of future great names playing some of their earliest gigs with Charles, such as trumpeters Marcus Belgrave and Wallace Davenport, or saxophonist Stanley Turrentine, not to mention those whose careers burgeoned as continuing members of the band, such as David ‘Fathead’ Newman and Hank Crawford.

And in many ways, the range of music and styles on show here prefigures Charles’s later days, where he was as happy reinterpreting a country hit as he was a blues or an American Songbook classic. From 1949 to 1950 he’s a member of the Maxim trio, singing standards such as ‘Blues Before Sunrise’ or ‘How Long Blues’. But by mid-1950 the releases come under his name, and his first larger band with the horns of Teddy Buckner and Marshal Royal points to his future direction.

By CD 2 (looping briefly back to 1949 but mainly running from 1952) the early hits are starting to show up, ‘Walkin’ and Talkin’ To Myself’, ‘Mess Around’ and ‘I’ve Got a Woman’. From then on, the CDs are leavened with plenty of his well-known songs, but apart from a few tracks in the closing disc, this box focuses on the era when almost all his hits were singles, and after his first album in 1957 it was really in the 1960s that his biggest LP successes started. So, for a pretty comprehensive coverage of Charles’ early work on Swing Time, Atlantic, ABC Paramount, and finally Impulse!, this set does the job very well.