Sinatra! The Complete Guide

REVIEW: L.A. Is My Lady was Sinatra's last studio album with Reprise. Recorded when he was seventy years old, and reuniting him with Quincy Jones, who had been instrumental during Sinatra's collaborations with Count Basie, Quincy brings a slick sythesized sound to Sinatra's last album. How does it work? About like you'd expect: cold, upbeat, a noticably uncomfortable blend of old school and technology. The title track is a too-obvious attempt to mimic the success of "Chicago" and "(Theme From) New York, New York" - with annoyingly up-front sythesizers grabbing too much attention on the busy track. The same holds for the distractingly processed back-up vocals on "Mack The Knife." Songs like "Until The Real Thing Comes Along" fare much better, showing that Sinatra can still sell a song, and Jones swings along with a traditional orchestra that's tight and simpatico with Frank. A hot guitar lick bounces along with Frank on the sprightly "After You've Gone," and there's thick slices of trumpet licks on the kicky "A Hundred Years From Today." Frank sounds a little tired on "The Best Of Everything," but otherwise the track is a bright slice of in-the-pocket swing, and there's an interesting scat-percussion effect carrying through "It's All Right With Me" but Sinatra again sounds tired, and as if he's trying to keep up with the clockwork playing of the band - there's no ebb and flow here for Sinatra's phrasing - it just plows through song after song, giving an artificial cheeriness to the album. It can be a fun listen if you're not listening too closely, but otherwises it's discouraging to hear Frank relegated again to second fiddle to the band, as he was during the first years of singing with Dorsey. All in all it's a bright, slick, professional album, that's sounds exactly like what it is: a hot young orchestra playing backup to an old singer.

REVIEW: Las Vegas grew up with Frank Sinatra. From it's shady, mob-driven origins, which have been chronicled minutely elsewhere, to it's 1980s transformation into a family-friendly gathering place, Las Vegas has always relied on high-powered entertainment to lure adults into its casinos, and from 1958 to the early 1990s, Frank Sinatra was THE headline act. From The Sands to Caesar's Palace, if Frank was in town, all the marquee had to say is "He's HERE" and everyone would know that Sinatra was gracing the stage that week. This important box set, gathering five dates from a variety of venues, is revealing in a couple of ways, showcasing Frank's early, 1960s Rat-Pack brashness, and chronicling his slow decline in shows from the Eixties, Seventies, and Eighties, and echoing Vegas's own decline from shady get-away, to post-pop respected status.

The five-CD/DVD set is somewhat jarring, with the first two discs presenting Frank at his most daring, with racist, catty remarks punctuating music sets that were filled with some of the most ribald, jazzy singing ever caught on tape. The first show, with the Ray Sinatra Orchestra, dates from 1961, and was for a planned live album release, which was then scrapped after Frank's plans for a world tour. The show is tight and breezy, with Sinatra singing as if he was newly-minted, full of sass and sparkle.

No less ferocious is the second disc, which captures Frank with the Count Basie Orchestra in 1966, joyfully bouncing his way through a set that included a mostly brassy renditions of "Come Fly With Me" and "Get Me To The Church On Time" with moodier showings being rare, but "The September Of My Years" makes a rare, and welcome live appearance, but otherwise, the Vegas sets are high on punchiness, and low on pathos.

Chronologically, the 1978 DVD show is next, and this shows a sea change in the way Sinatra conducted his shows. His shows are softer now, the brass-knuckled glee that electrified his earlier shows are replaced by sparkling showmanship, and the backstage footage shows Frank hobnobbing with guests; getting his picture taken with fans; goosing the standup comic through the curtain, and getting his onstage lubrication ready to his liking. Sinatra in his sixties is mellower onstage, but has the gleam in his eye that comes from his enduring joy of singing. He riffs with the audience, but his voice is less sure, the notes less "on", and the evening has a polish and ease to it that has grown over the previous shotgun abandon which used to surprise his audience. Now, the mostly mature crowd is shouting out for "My Way" and Frank is warbling out somewhat misguided renditions of "Baubles, Bangles and Beads" which the audience nontheless eats up.

The final two shows, both taken from the 1980s, are notable in that Frank is now "The Chairman of the Board"; "Ol' Blue Eyes," and the master of his domain. This is Sinatra at his most professional, in his element, at his ease - he mixes decades of songs effortlessly, with modern numbers like "You Are The Sunshine Of My Life" and "Somethin' Stupid" rubbing shoulders with "Witchcraft" and "Angel Eyes." Frank's voice is more hit-and-miss on these discs, but his personal charm, undeniable talent, and masterful phrasing, carry the day.

The booklet which accompanies this exhaustive set is thick with praise; no less than six essays are written about Frank's domination of Las Vegas nights, along with sidebars by all three of the Sinatra kids, and others who were on-hand to witness one or more of Frank's now-legendary performances.

In an era when Vegas is luring past-their-prime talent to fill arenas with aging baby-boomers and their hard-earned retirement savings, this box set by Reprise is a good way to remember that Vegas might not have survived at all had it not been for it's hardest-working ambassador.

Sinatra: New York [BOX SET]
Reprise Records R2 520602 [4CD 1DVD];
Released November 3, 2009

Amazon.com Widgets

The steadfast legacy of Ol' Blue Eyes continues to unfold as Reprise preps Sinatra: New York (4 CD/1 DVD), a five-disc box set of live Frank Sinatra performances due Nov. 3. These previously unreleased recordings are pulled from Sinatra concerts in legendary New York City venues between 1955 and 1990, captured on four CDs and a DVD.

The digital download will cost a whopping $45 less than the feel-it-between-your-palms physical edition, which for $79.99 includes rare photographs and tributes, liner notes and essays by a flurry of friends and admirers: Frank Sinatra Jr., Martin Scorsese, Twyla Tharp, director William Friedkin (The Exorcist), photographer George Kalinsky and Joe and Sal Scognamillo of The Chairman of the Board's favorite, Patsy's Italian Restaurant.

To view the complete track listing click here.

REVIEW: It's official. Reprise records and the Sinatra family have officially gone the "Elvis" route of reissuing. For years, RCA felt the need to re-issue anything Elvis that they could find: alternate takes, live shows, mono and stereo versions, etc. ad nauseum. With this release, I can safely say that Sinatra now rates the same slavish collector's mania, and that Reprise is all too willing to satiate his salivating fans appetites. Patterned exactly after 2006's Vegas box set, New York doesn't quite have the same appeal of the previous set, due to the law of diminishing returns, both in quantity and quality. The quantity is less, with some CD's here timing in at under thirty-eight minutes, and the audio quality, especially on the earliest concerts, is shockingly poor. Taken from radio broadcasts, the 1955 and 1963 concerts are perhaps the worst offenders, but still have interest for fans, since it documents the live reunion of Sinatra with his former boss, big-band leader Tommy Dorsey, and they still banter back and forth with acerbic humor. The two concerts from 1974 cover much the same ground as The Main Event, with Frank in good voice, but still singing such dreck as "Bad Bad Leroy Brown" (and I, for one, didn't need two more versions of it to grace my collection). CD four has two short concerts, the first from 1984 and the second from 1990, with Frank still able to command the crowds, but it's disappointing to have such short documents from these later years. The final disc is a DVD concert filmed at Carnegie Hall, June 25, 1980, and is a great concert, but even this has been edited - not the full concert. Sinatra was certainly as iconic a figure in New York as he was in Vegas, but this box, despite it's pleasures, feels stretched thin, and not as vital as his previous releases.

Sinatra-Jobim: The Complete Reprise Recordings
Concord Records CRE-32026 [CD];
Released May 4, 2010

REVIEW: Concord Records has taken the reigns from Warner/Reprise in the reissuing of many of Frank's later albums; we've had reissues (with bonus tracks) of My Way, Strangers In The Night, and now, a combination of two of Frank's better, though less-appreciated efforts: his teaming with Antonio Carlos Jobim, which resulted in tracks for one-and-a-half albums. Here, those original tracks are gathered onto one disc, which is a blessing, since we don't have to wade through the less-than-stellar pop tracks found on Sinatra & Co.. I've always considered Sinatra and Jobim's pairing to be a marriage that worked; the soft, easy bossa-nova rhythms that were all the rage in the early 1960s were a surprising match with Frank's softer side. This particular release has a few rare tracks, the first "Off Key" (Desafinado) is an odd, back and forth duet between Sinatra and Jobim exchanging lover's remarks which doesn't really work, and which previously saw the light of day on The Complete Reprise Studio Recordings box, while "The Song of Sabia" was previously released on the 1977 compilation LP Portrait Of Sinatra on Reprise. The songs receive a sparkling 24-bit remastering here, but there's a caveat; instead of the final edits used on the original albums, the producers went back to the original tapes, meaning that some mistakes that had been papered over are re-introduced to the listener. The booklet, featuring new, self-consciously written notes by Stan Cornyn, and quotes from many of the participants, round out the package. If you've not been a fan of these particular recordings, this new set will do nothing to change your mind, but for those of us who find a bewitching power to Sinatra's & Jobim's pairing, this is an ideal collection.