The life of the great American song-writer Irving Berlin spanned most of the great events of the twentieth century. His remarkable trajectory from a small town in Russia to a mansion in Manhattan is the quintessential story of an immigrant who embraced the opportunities America had to offer and who gave creative riches back to it many times over. Berlin’s musical education, like that of so many American song-writers from Stephen Foster to the present, was spotty but he had a crystal clear vision of what he wanted and meticulously polished his songs to perfection. These high standards give each song a vivid personality and structural integrity that makes them a joy to arrangers. Berlin’s fondness for playing with genres is picked up by the arrangers here, who include jazz, ragtime, Dixieland, mambo, calypso and salsa stylings of various songs.