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This session deserves to be as popular as the Beach Boys. It represents the "cool" West Coast jazz sound at its creative best--complex yet light, tight, and perpetually fresh. Marty Paich's arrangements serve less as background accompaniment than as a luminous foil to the equally inventive elocutions of the singer. If there's a better solution to the challenge of balancing ensemble cohesiveness with individual expressiveness, I haven't heard it.As for Mel, there's admittedly less "personality" than on his later sessions, but the gain is a concentrated focus on the song performances--twelve "art objects," each representing the very best that could be squeezed out of composer, arranger, instrumentalists, and vocalist at a given moment. Thinking of Rossetti's description of the sonnet as a "moment's monument," it may be no exaggeration to regard this recording as a monumental achievement. In any case, I'm tickled to have made its discovery, however late.