Alongside Ella Fitzgerald and Billy Holiday, she is now considered one of the most influential singers in jazz: Sarah Lois Vaughan, born in 1924 and affectionately known simply as "Sassy", who sang in the orchestras of Earl Hines and Billy Eckstein at the beginning of her career (and also played the piano!), before performing mainly as a soloist from 1945 onwards. The five years (1949-54) in which she recorded mainly slow, popular ballads with studio orchestras for Columbia marked her breakthrough. Sarah Vaughan was a star, and during her Mercury years (1954-59), she fully established herself - now even on two tracks. On the one hand, she worked with thoroughbred jazz musicians such as Clifford Brown, Cannonball Adderley and others, but she also continued to make commercially successful recordings with "easy-listening" orchestras, such as "Sassy" with Hal Mooney and his orchestra in 1956. Mooney's relaxed and tasteful orchestral arrangements, on which Sarah Vaughan once again proves how well she is able to do justice to the mood and atmosphere of each individual song, prove that easy listening does not have to mean shallow. The enormous range of her voice, which is already fully developed here, continues to amaze, and its flexibility and agility really do have instrumental dimensions.