Raymond Leveen

For the first time in over fifty years, Harbinger Records will release 'Ballads for the Age of Science,' the most successful educational recordings of all time, as a six-CD box set. Featuring more than four dozen original songs written by Hy Zaret, co-author of the iconic popular song 'Unchained Melody,' and Lou Singer between 1959 and 1961, the albums introduced scientific concepts and terms using catchy, easy-to-learn lyrics and music to grade school students across America in the early 1960s.

For the first time in over fifty years, Harbinger Records will release 'Ballads for the Age of Science,' the most successful educational recordings of all time, as a six-CD box set. Featuring more than four dozen original songs written by Hy Zaret, co-author of the iconic popular song 'Unchained Melody,' and Lou Singer between 1959 and 1961, the albums introduced scientific concepts and terms using catchy, easy-to-learn lyrics and music to grade school students across America in the early 1960s.

It's taken me two weeks to write this review of Ann Hampton Callaway's recent 8-shows-in-four-days run at Dizzy's Jazz Club at Lincoln Center, where she paid musical tribute to the late, great Sarah Vaughan, and I hope you buy the reason for such procrastination. Since late September last year, I've now seen four different Callaway cabaret shows at three different venues and reviewed two of them and, well, writing about how terrific Ann is on a cabaret/nightclub stage is getting a bit difficult as well as boring. I mean, I'm running out of words in my personal thesaurus to describe Callaway's consistent excellence, not to mention how she seems to provide a periodic master class in cabaret performance. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt I needed to prove I was up to this reviewing challenge, and a show as wonderful as From Sassy to Divine: A Celebration of Sarah Vaughan deserved more kudos on what Rachel Maddow calls, 'The Internet Machine.'