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Ring-A-Ding-Ding!
Four for the Road:
Records to remember
By Jim Emerson
There's so much greatness and near-greatness spread
out over so many Frank Sinatra records that picking favorites is almost futile. But I'm
going to start off with the absolute essentials -- two swingers and two brooders, all on
Capitol and arranged by Nelson Riddle -- that are so vital I simply can't imagine any
citizen of the 20th century living without them.
Songs For Swingin' Lovers!
Until I played this album for the first time, I thought I could go the rest of
my life without hearing a corny old chestnut like it's opening song, "You Make Me
Feel So Young." But Sinatra being Sinatra, he doesn't just sing a song, he pulls you
inside it along with him. Every time I play it, I'm struck anew by the freshness and
buoyancy of these songs, and Sinatra sustains that ebullient, lighter-than-air feeling (to
quote the Sinatrified lyrics to Cole Porter's "Anything Goes") "until this
record spins to a close": Yeah, I know exactly what he's singing about: He
Makes Me Feel So Young! And that's just the beginning: the famous "I've Got
You Under My Skin" is also here, along with irresistible versions of "It
Happened in Monterey," "I Thought About You," "How About You?"...
A Swingin' Affair
Want to know a secret (he said, trying to suggest a tone of Sinatra-esque
intimacy)? The follow-up to Swingin' Lovers may be
even better. It swings even harder, but there's also a slightly wider array of
instrumental colors in Riddle's arrangements -- the bass-like piano and percussion intro
to "Lonesome Road," for example. Sinatra's masculine swagger has never been more
charming, like a young buck exulting in his own physical (and in this case, vocal) grace
and agility. (He may have started off skinny, but after Columbia could sing even the most
delicate and flowery tunes without any trace of wimpiness.) And the material is every bit
as strong and catchy as its swingin' predecessor: "Night and Day," "I Won't
Dance," "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To" (radiating such warmth and
coziness you can actually feel how awful nice it is by the fire), "From This Moment
On," "If I Had You," "Oh! Look at Me Now" (the epitome of
young-buck-in-spring exuberance)...
In the Wee Small Hours of the
Morning When the whole wide world is fast asleep and
you're not, there's no better company than this dreamy album that feels like it had to
have been recorded in the middle of the night. Once you've heard the melancholy clarinet
figure on "What Is This Thing Called Love," you'll never forget it -- and any
other version of Cole Porter's will seem anemic in comparison. Other moody highlights
include "When Your Lover Has Gone," "Dancing on the Ceiling," "I
Get Along Without You Very Well" and "It Never Entered My Mind" (perhaps
the definitive musical evocation of loneliness).
Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the
Lonely The melancholy of Wee Small
Hours deepens into abject, booze-drenched despair on Only
the Lonely. While the earlier record still holds out the promise of dawn, the
night of Only the Lonely is an endless sea of
blackness. Riddle's arrangements are hushed and motionless, as if suspending in time
during a pause between breaths. The songs are so exquisitely bleak and beautiful that they
send chills down your spine and leave you stunned -- especially the immortal "Angel
Eyes" and the greatest saloon song of all time, "One For My Baby." For
flawlessly re-creating the ambience of drinking alone in a deserted dive at a quarter to
three in the morning -- right there in your own home -- only a straight shot of Only the Lonely will do. Better have
another drink, and make it a double.
Other Capitol keepers: Avoiding clunkers is easy with the
Capitol albums, because there aren't any. The three-disc, 75-song Capitol Years
anthology is a dream collection of timeless standards (and has a few previously released
gems as well), but it's something less than definitive simply because most of Sinatra's
albums on the label were conceived as albums; no matter how great the individual
tracks, they sound even better in context. But there's also a nice four-disc set of the
complete Sinatra Singles on Capitol, arranged in chronological order.
Only marginally less essential that the four nonpareil titles above
are the albums: Come Fly With Me and Come Dance With Me (both with Billy
May), Songs For Young Lovers/Swing Easy (two
EPs on one CD), Nice 'N' Easy, Sinatra's
Swingin' Session, and Close to You, a unique
(and tender) collaboration with the Hollywood String Quartet (all arranged by Nelson
Riddle); Point of No Return (with Alex Stordahl); and No One Cares and Where Are You? (with Gordon
Jenkins). The titles let you know exactly what kind of music to expect. Oh, and
don't forget A Jolly Christmas (re-issued by Capitol under the stupendously
imaginative title, The Sinatra Christmas Album), which features wonderful
Sinatra-fied carols such as "Jingle Bells," "The Christmas Waltz,"
"Mistletoe and Holly" and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas."
Columbia: The collections range from one disc to a dozen, but
probably the best anthology of Columbia material is the four-disc, 72-track The Voice:
The Columbia Years (1943-1952). There's also a nice 2-disc collection called Portrait
of Sinatra. And for completists, there's also a 12-disc, 285-track box called
(appropriately enough) The Columbia Years: The Complete Recordings. Also
available (and highly recommended) are a couple of terrific 10-inch Columbia albums that
have been filled out on CD with generous "bonus tracks" (including some
never-before released takes): The Voice, and Swing and Dance with Frank Sinatra.
Reprise: This is where it gets messy. Except for the
must-have She Shot Me Down and Francis
Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim (and probably a few others,
particularly the Basie discs, Sinatra-Basie, It Might as Well Be Swing, and Basie arranger Neal Hefti's Sinatra & Swingin' Brass), none of these albums hangs
together as cohesively as the carefully assembled Capitol sets. The good stuff is pretty
good (though, with the above exceptions, hardly ever much better than that). But the
bad stuff is so awfully, painfully bad that one or two bad apples can indeed
spoil the whole bunch, rendering unlistenable an album that might otherwise be enjoyable
(like Strangers in the Night, ruined for me by Frank's really icky take on Petula
Clark's "Downtown" and an inexcusably blatant splice in "My Baby Just Cares
For Me"). Of course, if you have the patience, the anal personality, and/or the
obsessive inclination, you could program around the stink-bombs every time you put in a
CD.... All of which makes the four-disc, 81-track Reprise Collection
particularly attractive -- except that the varying sonic characteristics of the recordings
can sometimes be distracting (especially when concert tracks are placed next to studio
ones) -- and you've still got to deal with (or, rather find ways to avoid) potholes like
"America the Beautiful" and, yes, "My Way."
More selective, but excellent, Reprise collections include the
single-disc Everything Happens to Me, with off-the-beaten-tracks chosen by
Sinatra himself (this is NOT a "best-of," but a more personal -- and interesting
-- set); and a wonderful two-disc sampler called His Very Best (or The
Very Best of Frank Sinatra) that really does give you a lot of the finest stuff
(including the exquisite "Wave," which is otherwise only available on the BIG
Reprise set) while ignoring the more popular dreck -- although, unfortunately, "My
Way" remains unavoidable even here....
Other decent-to-splendid Reprise albums include: Ring-A-Ding-Ding, I Remember Tommy, Moonlight
Sinatra, Academy Award Winners (also known as Frank Sintatra Sings Days of Wine and Roses, Moon River and
Other Acacemy Award Winners), All Alone, Francis
A. and Edward K. (with Duke Ellington), the "official classic" September
of My Years, and maybe a few others. The first two parts of Trilogy
are also good; Billy May arranges choice songs from the past (particularly wonderful are
"Let's Face the Music and Dance," "Street of Dreams," and "They
All Laughed") and Don Costa handles the present with mixed results -- but what can
any arranger really do with Neil Diamond's inexplicably ubiquitous (at the time) drone,
"Song Sung Blue," or -- god help us -- something called "That's What God
Looks Like to Me"? But Gordon Jenkins' vision of the future is a
nightmare. Luckily, this tacky "cantata" -- "in three tenses" -- has
been confined to solitary on the second CD, which will make a nice coaster for your
highball...
There are also two terrific live concert albums on Reprise: Sinatra
and Sextet Live in Paris 1962 (issued in 1994) and the third and final recorded
Sinatra-Basie collaboration, a 2-LP set now on one CD called Sinatra at the Sands,
taped in Vegas in 1966 (and almost spoiled by some stupid wisecracking during the second
song, "I've Got a Crush on You.")
-30- |
 
Click here for a detailed look at Sinatra's 30 best albums
Or here for a detailed look at Sinatra's 50 best songs (from
ballads to swingers...) |
