Mel Tormé was a cat who knew how to swing. The 1962 single ‘Comin’ Home Baby’ was recorded in New York City and pulses with downtown Big Apple cool. With its finger-clicking, wisecrackin’ beat and swoonsome vocal swoops, this is the Velvet Fog at his most seductive. He must’ve had the kittens a’tappin’ at his window.

An astute interpreter, Carmen McRae was a contemporary of Billie Holliday whose talent for finding the irony in seemingly innocent settings is aptly demonstrated here by ‘The Sound Of Silence’, taken from her 1968 Atlantic album of the same name. The wistful Paul Simon original is transformed in an upbeat, urban jazz style by McRae’s arch vocal, rendering its lyrics all the more poignant.

Ananda Shankar was a man with a dream: “to combine Western and Indian music into a new form”. The results were no less than astonishing. Combining the ancient sounds of the sitar and tabla with the most modern electronics he could lay his hands on, he created funky, futuristic floorshakers with a foresight akin to his Western mentor Jimi Hendrix. Witness his 1970 version of the Stones’ ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ and realise how the modern world is only just catching up.

Slinky, sinister and set to a smouldering Afro-Latin beat, Herbie Mann’s ‘Harlem Nocturne’ is a panther loose on the city streets. An established bandleader in the 1950s, the Brooklyn-born flautist is one of his instrument’s best exponents.

Carol LoTempio’s first recording ‘No, No, No, Not That’ was so suggestive that she changed her name to April Stevens in case the single was banned. Her sultry-voiced alter ego went on to fashion some of the most mysterious and idiosyncratic songs of the ’50s and ’60s. This, a collaboration with her equally duplicitous brother Antonio - also known as Nino Tempo - was a hit both in 1959 and 1965, and is likely to become one again.

Back in 1961, pianist and bandleader Les Baxter heard a siren calling. Her name was ‘Tiki’, she was a Polynesian goddess, and her four-octave cry was to take Baxter and his band into another dimension. Her exotica shimmers across the surface of this most beautiful version of ‘A Taste of Honey’ from the aptly-named The Primitive And The Passionate LP.

Still classified as an R&B artist, the genius Ray Charles was paving the way for what would later be called soul when he cut ‘Don’t Let The Sun Catch You Cryin’’ in 1959. The plaintive delivery of sad, yet resigned vocals and deft strokes across the keyboard are only matched by the sublime orchestration of the piece. No late night basement dive’s creaky old jukebox should be without this song.

If you catch traces of blue smudged across the surface of Esther Phillips’ ‘And I Love Him’ - despite the cool jazz setting and the optimism of the Lennon/McCartney lyrics - then you’re tapping her troubled soul. A formidably versatile singer, Esther could stamp her originality across any genre, from blues to country. A prodigy in music - she was recording with Johnny Otis at the age of 13 - she also began battling various addictions in her teenage years. Phillips will always sound distinctly after-hours.

Vibraphonist Dave Pike was a captain of the jet set age. In fact, the ensemble he put together for his classic 1966 album Jazz For The Jet Set was a truly supersonic amalgam of talent - Herbie Hancock, Clark Terry and Melvin Lastie. Catch the cocktail happy hour with this cut, Pike and Hancock mixing up a cool version of ‘Sunny’.

Hitting a beatnik vibe with a Gershwin standard, Barney Kessel’s ‘Summertime’ combines surf’s-up guitar with coffee house aromas in a manner not dissimilar to the John Barry Trio of the same era. “It has been my desire to create a new sound which people will want to hear over and over, a sound they will be able to understand immediately and to which they will be unable to resist dancing,” said Kessel at the time. Certainly it’s the red-hots and not the blues you’ll be diggin’ from this cut, from the 1961 Reprise album Bossa Nova.

She was 52 and still effortlessly outclassing those divas half her age when Ella Fitzgerald covered Randy Newman’s ‘I Wonder Why’ for the album Ella. Recorded in Olympic Sound Studios in London in the last four days of May 1969, the First Lady of Song tuned into the cultural shift of the times and blew the hippies away with her full gospel treatment of the protest song.

Similarly, cornet legend Nat Adderley managed to turn Tony ‘Blankety-Blank’ Hatch’s ‘Call Me’ into a streetwise soundtrack for swinging hipsters on his 1966 Atlantic album Sayin’ Somethin’. Say what? Nat: “There is not such a big gap between blues and the avant garde. All music is to be listened to and enjoyed”.

When Jon Hendricks recorded the ¡Salud! Joao Gilberto album in 1961, he was paying tribute to the Brazilian songwriter and bossa nova head honcho: “Listening to Gilberto has been one of the greatest singing lessons I’ve ever had”. Yet this, his own joint composition with Nat Adderley’s altered blues jive, is surely the finest cut on the whole LP. Songs just don’t come more saucy than this.

Ada Lee was another child prodigy, equally adept at jazz, soul, gospel and blues. Born in Springfield, Ohio to a trumpet player father, she trained at Dayton Conservatory of Music and was then awarded a scholarship to Wilberforce University. At the same time she was working with the likes of Count Basie, Lionel Hampton and Dick Hyman, who arranged and conducted this number. The sultry jazz of ‘Night In Tunisia’ comes from the evocative 1961 album Ada Lee Comes On!

What’s to say about Sammy Davis Jr. that hasn’t already been said? A man who bestrides 1960s cool like a pop culture colossus, Sammy was never happier than when he was belting out Broadway classics and twisting them to his own hepcat shapes. His 1962 rendering of ‘Too Close For Comfort’ is Sammy at his slinkiest. And if you fancy joining the ace face of the original ‘Ocean’s Eleven’ at the gaming tables, then point your finger at: www.sammydavisjrcasino.com

A fellow traveller in the Las Vegas lounges of the 1960s, Juan Garcia Esquivel apparently came from a small Mexican village, but if this 1962 version of Cole Porter’s ‘I Get A Kick Out Of You’ is to be believed, then Esquivel truly came from the stars. A master arranger and notorious perfectionist, Esquivel’s pioneering loungecore hits a peak on this track from the aptly-named More Of Other Worlds, Other Sounds (Reprise).

Nightclub heart-throb and one-time ‘Junior Sinatra’ Bobby Darin left the Bobby Soxers behind in late 1959, when this swinging version of ‘Mack The Knife’, a tune from Brecht-Weill’s ‘Threepenny Opera’, hit the top of the American charts. It heralded his move toward light big band jazz, and highlighted the more raunchy, R&B appeal of his voice.

The Leopard Lounge’s first act draws to a hot conclusion with Harold Betters’ ‘Papa-Ooh-MauMau’. Taken from the trombonist’s 1965 album Ram-Bunk-Shush, the track demonstrates not only Betters’ mastery of the pun but the big, funky sound cooked up by his band; pianist John Thomas, bassist Chuck Ramsey, drummer Russ Lewellen, guitarist Joe Galbraith, and fellow trombonist Slide Hampton. After this, you’ll need to coooool down…