It's a pleasant picture, a pleasant thought -- that as much care-easing joy as The Three Suns project can be produced almost as easily and simply as breathing. It's a pleasant thought -- but it isn't quite true. For there is a great deal more behind the success of The Three Suns than appears on the surface.

      These are no casual "cats" who sit down and start playing the first thing that comes to mind. Their public performances are carefully constructed from their years of experience in sensing the feeling of an audience. Analyzed carefully, a Three Suns program proves to be doing at least two things simultaneously: reaching the listener just where that listener wants to be reached, and keeping him expectantly off balance by sliding in things that go well beyond the mood they have been creating. The knowledge that produces this kind of programming can come with experience, but the ability to fulfill the wide-ranging demands of such programming can come only from sound training. And that is where the secret of The Three Suns' success begins.

      The Three Suns are an intimate group -- and not simply in the sense that there are only three men involved, playing closely integrated music. The intimacy goes beyond that, for they are a close family group -- two brothers and a cousin. The brothers are Al and Morty Nevins, who come from Washington, D. C. Their cousin, Artie Dunn. is from Boston.

      Al Nevins, the undeclared but generally conceded head Sun, is the group's guitarist. He didn't plan to be a guitarist. He picked up the instrument relatively late in his career for he started out on the violin and viola, studying under Leon Barzin of the National Orchestral Society of New York. But in the realm of popular music neither the violin nor the viola perform a particularly probing function, so Al switched to guitar when The Three Suns were formed. Today he plays almost any instrument that has strings attached.

      Both brother Morty and cousin Artie Dunn are pianists, but in the closely woven sound structure of The Three Suns there was no place for a piano. So this versatile pair shifted to other instruments that contributed to the particular aural blend that the Suns wanted to feature -- Morty concentrated on accordion while Artie, who had been a theater organist in Dorchester, Massachusetts, before he came to New York to work as a pianist for the Leo Feist publishing house, returned to the organ.

      These are The Three Suns that you have seen and heard filling some of the country's most pleasant after-dark rooms with their melodies. There they weave their deceptively casual, happy-go-lucky spell. On records The Three Suns can be even more deceptive. In this collection, which covers the decade or more that they have been recording for RCA, The Three Suns are sometimes the two Nevins brothers and Artie Dunn, or they may suddenly swell up to a group of five, six, seven or even thirteen pieces.

      The basic Three Suns are heard in three selections -- The Donkey Serenade, Schubert's Serenade and Allah's Holiday, all recorded in 1949. For Leroy Anderson's galloping Fiddle Faddle, recorded the following year, the group became a quartet with the addition of organist Marty Gold, who has been closely associated with the Suns for years both as an arranger and an occasional performer on their discs.

      During their first year of recording for RCA, 1947, The Three Suns were actually a quintet when they played Sleepy Time Gal -- the two added starters were guitarist Art Ryerson and bassist Trigger Alpert, fresh from his success with Glenn Miller's Army Air Force Band. The Suns were the basis for a slightly different quintet in 1951 for Delibes' Coppelia Waltz and Two Hearts in Three-Quarter Time. This time the additions were Marty Gold on organ and pianist Larry Green, taking time out from leading his popular society band.

      On two occasions. the Suns have doubled their number. They played After You've Gone in 1950 as a sextet made up of the two Nevinses, Dunn, Gold, Ryerson and bassist Lou Spinelli. Three years later, for Ecstasy Tango, they formed a different sextet, this one made up of the basic Suns plus Sy Mann, piano, Sandy Becker, bass, and Phil Kraus, drums. And on two other occasions they have extended themselves to septet proportions -- for Plink, Plank, Plunk! in 1952 they added a second guitar (Billy Mure), a second organ (Marty Gold ), as well as Frank Carroll, bass, and Phil Kraus, drums; while the septet for Dancing with Tears in My Eyes in 1955 was formed by the addition of two guitars (Mure and George Barnes), a vibraphonist (Jack Saunders), Sandy Block on bass and Stan Krell, drums.

      One group heard in this collection can only be described as the Super-Three Suns. It is made up of six guitars -- Al Nevins, Art Ryerson, Billy Mure, George Barnes, Sal Salvador and Jay Pizzarelli; two organs (Artie Dunn. Marty Gold); Morty Nevins' accordion; two drummers (Phil Kraus and Bunny Shawker ); Sandy Block on bass and -- an imaginative extra fillip -- Maria Alba De Warren playing castanets. These Three Suns -- all thirteen of them -- produce the glittering 1954 performance of Perdido.

      But no matter how The Three Suns may be augmented, no matter whether they are playing popular standards such as After You've Gone or Sleepy Time Gal, or waltzing, tangoing or serenading, all their music bears the typically happy-go-lucky Three Suns sound that cascades through all these numbers.