After recording 16 studio albums for
Columbia Records between 1956 and 1963, Mathis accepted an offer to switch to the
Mercury label with one advantage being that he would have more control over his recordings. During the first 15 months at his new home, he recorded and released five LPs and began work on number six, which would be exclusively devoted to songs from musicals from the
Great White Way or, as he described it, "things I was listening to because I was in New York. I would go to the theater a lot and listen to all that great music from different shows." but the most recent of them,
Olé was the first not to make
the magazine's list of (what was now) the top 150 albums of the week since his 1956
Columbia debut. In the liner notes for the 2012 release of
Broadway, James Ritz describes how "John swings unabashedly and unrelentingly thanks to
Allyn Ferguson, who outdid himself with a set of wild and uninhibited arrangements." Mathis has fond memories of the arranger/conductor: "Great stuff... lots of interesting rhythm patterns from Allyn. He was a taskmaster. He was very, very smart and he always put that into his music. He was very esoteric as far as his jazz was concerned. I just sort of tagged along. I enjoyed the challenge and vocally I think it worked. I was quite enamored at the time with
Lena Horne and I think a lot of it reflects that."
AllMusic reviewer Al Campbell explains, "At the time, Mercury felt the album was too upbeat and not the type of romantic material Mathis had been so successful with during his previous tenure with Columbia." ==Track listing==