You wouldn’t exactly have expected to find Sir Michael Tippett recording a cabaret programme but Sir Richard Rodney Bennett with his long-time love of jazz, has never been content to play the conventional ‘great composer’. His light, husky voice and cool piano conjure up exactly the right late-night atmosphere, heavy with stale smoke, second-hand drink and occasional maudlin disillusion. Many of the songs here, such as the impish ‘Early to bed’, are his own, laid-back and wry, with wittily Wodehouseian lyrics. They sit easily alongside oldies like ‘It might as well be spring’ and Someone to watch over me’, delivered in his own deceptively casual manner; his haunting take on ‘Don’t sleep in the subway’ reveals depths unplumbed by Petula Clarke. After the elegiac ‘Goodbye for now’, the title track’s vision of Sloaney ladies straying into (one imagines) Ronnie Scott’s makes a malevolently funny coda to a highly enjoyable session.

This Noel Cowardish poison-pen clerihew is absolutely irresistible and must be heard to be believed. In both departments of his musical activities, as composer or performer, Chandos has done Bennett proud. Further volumes in either series will be something to look forward to.

What was important was to acknowledge that the finely crafted marriage of words and music that flourished in the thirties and forties – indeed the golden age of American popular song – simply aren’t period pieces, not when a Richard Rodney Bennett is around to pick them up, dust them off and allow their magic to start all over again.