The complete Sinatra Reprise: almost perfection

Francis Albert Sinatra was a lot of things, some good and some bad,
but firstly and foremost he was a singer. Over a 55-year career he
went from being a skinny mama's boy to the undispuded champion of
popular vocalists. If we define popular music as everything except
classical and purely indigenous folk musics, Frank Sinatra was the
best singer of popular music, of either gender and any race or
nationality, at least in the English language,in human history to
date. He set out to sing the best entertainment and musical theatre
songs he could, the best way that he could imagine them sung. He
trained himself to sing to a standard elsewhere found only in operatic
music, but with very different goals: he made being a microphone
singer from a pejorative to an accolade, developing his lung capacity
to emulate circular-breathing jazz brasswind players in sustained
notes and passages rather than for volume. He leveraged his early
popular mania with teenage, male-starved "bobbysoxers" into having the
pull with record companies and recording resources to execute his
ideas-great songs (new or decades-old, but well-crafted and with
melodies that held up and intelligent lyrics) with great arrangements
played by great musicians and recorded (in good rooms!) with state of
the art but essentially simple equipment by professionals- a situation
that seems quaint today with Pro Tools and sequencing software
available to high-schoolers.

Sinatra's career can be largely divided into four phases: the first
being his band singer work with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, his solo
debut on Columbia Records, his 50's departure-over the efforts of
Mitch Miller to make him record what he (usually correctly) considered
dreck-to Capitol Records, and finally his founding of his own label,
Reprise, on which his later career was spent. (His last efforts, the
commercially successful but musically dubious "Duets" pair, returned
him to Capitol, albeit with production by Phil Ramone and heavy doses
of "vocal Viagra" in the form of pitch correcting autotune plug-ins
for Pro Tools: by that point extensive consolidation of record labels
made the point somewhat moot.)

While many Sinatra purists will argue for starting a serious Sinatra
collection with the Columbia and Capitol box sets, I would start with
this one and work backwards. Frank's Reprise studio career extends
from December of 1960 to June of 1988, across seven U.S. presidents
and the peaks of the careers of Marilyn Monroe and Madonna. The
Reprise era starts at roughly Sinatra's peak period in every sense and
continues through what is really the end of his recording career.
Along the way, he records a good percentage of his best work, faces
the tragedies and adversities of his life, and exits stage right with
head unbowed.

Here, across twenty CDs, is the entire released studio work of Frank
Sinatra on the Reprise label. Much, arguably most, of it is
magnificent. He revisits many if not most of his favorite standards
from the Columbia and Capitol eras, adds a few new ones, and records
dozens of contemporary songs and "elegant novelties" from both old
standby writers (Cahn and Van Heusen, as always, leading the pack) and
then-current pop tunesmiths and Top 40 writer-performers. Simon and
Garfunkel (admittedly to their chagrin,as I'll expand on later), John
Denver, Neil Diamond, Sonny Bono, Joni Mitchell, Bob Gaudio and Jake
Holmes (the writing component of Frankie Valli's Four Seasons),
Beatles George Harrison and the Lennon-McCartney pair,and others find
themselves alongside Harold Arlen, Cole Porter and Jerome Kern.

A lot of derision has been directed toward's Frank's performances of
these songs, much of it no more than mean-spirited drivel. To be sure,
it doesn't always work: Frank openly treats Tony Hatch's "Downtown"
(made famous by Petula Clark, and rightly so) with contempt-he
actually sings "bleech!" at the end!-and is a fish out of water with
some of the Lennon-McCartney songs, and even what should be an easy
safe hit with the then-retro "Winchester Cathedral" winds up being not
a disaster but not quite up to the Rudy Vallee-evoking New Vaudeville
Band hit.

And yet-some of these songs are home runs by any standard. Harrison's
"Something", which Frank records not once but twice, was slammed
vitriolically by rock critics, but when Harrison's own performances of
the song started reflecting Frank's, the singer/songwriter's ultimate
accolade made them look foolish, and rightly so. You stick around,
Jack, it might show.

Special mention has to be made, here and now, of one of Sinatra's so
called "bons mot", the notorious Mrs.Robinson. Sending critics such as
the notorious Christgau (who would be the biggest idiot in the New
York music literary scene if Will Friedwald weren't so utterly
persistent and ingenious at stealing the title from beneath his nose)
into fits of apoplexy, this song deserves its own full-length essay in
and of itself. Suffice it to say it's Sinatra's response, and
backhanded apologia, even, to a series of events starting with the
Wrong Door Raid and is one of the very rare genuinely funny events of
Sinatra's entire musical universe. It's a classy swinging
ringer-dinger and a great sendup of the "seriousness" around the Paul
Simons and Bob Dylans in the sixties, and simultaneously lets Frank
have a little sophisticated adult fun at the expense of the mania
around "The Graduate". The first time I heard it, I broke out laughing
and couldn't stop for half an hour.

Accompanying the 20 CDs in two mini-albums reminiscent of the bound
books in which 78 rpm discs were sold, is a small hardbound cloth
cover book which I have in front of me, invaluable in writing this. It
contains interviews with Bill Miller and Al Caiola, and pieces by
Wilfrid Sheed, Stan Cornyn, and XM Radio "Frank's Place" DJ Jonathan
Schwartz. It's a good read, although the student of recording science
will regret the lack of technical and room details, the armchair
arranger and discographer will miss the lack of personnel rosters on
the sessions-almost all of which still exist-and the photo buffs will
miss many key photos and regret that others are rendered in a pastel
shade. (How one could not use William Claxton's classic photo of Ray
Charles, Marilyn Monroe and Jimmy Durante at a 1961 session is beyond
any earthly accounting.)

Although is the single must-have compilation to all serious
Sinatraphiles, above all others, I have to give it only four stars as
opposed to five. For one thing, it's not totally complete: while it
does include all the released studio sides, there are still many known
and unknown things which never have seen legitimate-or any-release.
Some of these are not really up to the standard, but others are,
beyond dispute. Also, there are some live releases, such as 1965's
"Live at the Sands with Count Basie" and 1974's "The Main Event" (with
a notorious Howard Cosell introduction) which are part and parcel of
the Sinatra oeuvre.

More seriously, many of the extant master tapes of some of these
sessions are of such quality that Compact Disk does not do them
justice. I have had the privilege-how and when are not for me to
disclose at this time- of hearing a small section of these tracks on
the very master tapes some of this set was mastered from, on a really
first rate high end system hooked to an Ampex deck with Boyk
mechanical ministrations and the notorious de Paravicini electronics.
Hearing these CDs, vintage U.S. release LPs, and the original tapes
successively made it clear that the LP's were somewhat closer in some
ways than the CDs to the tapes, and that the tapes were still better
to the extent that a future remaster to SACD or DVD-Audio, provided
that ADC's of sufficient quality are available, holds the promise of
sufficiently better sonics that hardcore audiophiles may well find
themselves buying this music yet one more time. Three hundred dollars
is not a colossal sum to most of the really serious audiophiles, but
if you are buying this as a lifetime investment you may want to factor
this in to your purchasing decisions.

On the other hand, life is too short to wait forever for the better
deal. In the long run, buying this set upfront can be a big saving of
time and money over piecemeal album purchases, and the case and book
are pretty and fuctional (although they will get dirty easily over
time and are not easily cleanable.) I have not regretted the purchase
of this set-at more than the current listed Amazon price-once during
the three years I've had it.

(Paul) wrote in message . com...
Frank Sinatra was the
best singer of popular music, of either gender and any race or
nationality, at least in the English language,in human history to
date.

I would put Ella Fitzgerald on equal footing. I don't think you can
put one of these legends above the other.

TB

Reprise Studio Recordings ,Frank Sinatra
From: (Paul)
Date: 10/27/2004 11:47 PM Pacific Standard Time
Message-id:

The complete Sinatra Reprise: almost perfection

Francis Albert Sinatra was a lot of things, some good and some bad,
but firstly and foremost he was a singer. Over a 55-year career he
went from being a skinny mama's boy to the undispuded champion of
popular vocalists. If we define popular music as everything except
classical and purely indigenous folk musics, Frank Sinatra was the
best singer of popular music, of either gender and any race or
nationality, at least in the English language,in human history to
date.

Best singer? Not likely given how many times he sang off key. He got most of
the noted right but he was hardly the best. He certainly was one of the most
popular.

He set out to sing the best entertainment and musical theatre
songs he could, the best way that he could imagine them sung. He
trained himself to sing to a standard elsewhere found only in operatic
music, but with very different goals:

Nah. Opera singers would likely get canned for doing the things he did with
most songs. He was a stylist unto himself but after the whisky took it's toll
on his voice he was not a great technician.

Recordings ,Frank Sinatra
From: (Tim Brown)
Date: 10/28/2004 1:06 PM Pacific Standard Time
Message-id:

(Paul) wrote in message
.com...
Frank Sinatra was the
best singer of popular music, of either gender and any race or
nationality, at least in the English language,in human history to
date.

I would put Ella Fitzgerald on equal footing. I don't think you can
put one of these legends above the other.


You can put them wherever you want personally. It's a matter of opinion dork.
But if you are looking for obvious impact on the music world you are way off
base. Ever heard of Billy Holiday? Nat King Cole? Elvis Presley? Ray Charles?
Aretha Franklin?