Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 12

Record label: Capitol

Produced: Voyle Gilmore

Recorded: Capitol Studios, Hollywood; June 1955–January 1956

Released: June 1956

Chart peak: 8 (UK) 2 (US)

Personnel: Frank Sinatra (v); Nelson Riddle (ar); orchestra including Milt Bernhart (tb); Harry Edison, Conrad Gozzo (t); Harry Klee (flute); Mahlon Clark (clarinet)

Track Listing: You Make Me Feel So Young; It Happened In Monterey; You’re Getting To Be A Habit With Me; You Brought A New Kind Of Love To Me; Too Marvellous For Words; Old Devil Moon; Pennies From Heaven; Love Is Here To Stay; I’ve Got You Under My Skin; I Thought About You; We’ll Be Together Again; Makin’ Whoopee; Swingin’ Down The Lane; Anything Goes; How About You?

Running time: 44.51

Current CD: RMG FRC6122

Further listening: Swing Easy (1954); A Swingin’ Affair (1957)

Further reading: Sinatra! The Song Is You: A Singer’s Art (Will Friedwald, 1995); www.franksinatra.com

Download: iTunes

When Capitol vice-president Alan Livingstone announced to their annual convention that he’d signed the down-and-out Sinatra (who had debt, depression and no career prospects), there was an audible groan. Livingstone: ‘My answer to them was, Look, I only know talent, and Frank is the best singer in the world.’ Though humble and grateful, Frank was having a hard time relinquishing his partnership with his ’40s arranger Axel Stordahl. Livingstone was determined to put him together with burgeoning talent Nelson Riddle: ‘Nelson knew how to back up singers and make them sound great.’ Getting to know each other over a few sides, Sinatra was impressed with Riddle’s 1953 treatment of World On A String, but upon hearing his polytonal ballad arranging told pianist Bill Miller, ‘Whew, we gotta be careful with him.’ Miller replied, ‘Hey, Frank, it’s different, it’s working.’

By mid-’55 Sinatra was back on top (thanks to the movie From Here To Eternity and a series of confident albums) and Nelson was forging his distinctive heartbeat tempo, swing-band-plus-strings style that fitted the new Sinatra like a made-to-measure tux. Recasting the repertoire of a previous generation in exhilarating new light and creating new standard songs in the process, Songs For Swingin’ Lovers was the epitome of the rejuvenated, finger-poppin’ Sinatra. Full of lyrical playfulness (‘Stars fractured ’bama last night’) and exuberant re-phrasing (his second chorus of It Happened In Monterey), this music had a vitality and sexiness that made women want to bed him and men want to be him, nowhere more so than in the legend that is the Riddle/Sinatra take on Cole Porter’s I’ve Got You Under My Skin. A brooding, sensuous groove that builds into an explosive, sputtering trombone solo (played by Milt Bernhart over the wrong chords, balancing on a box to get closer to the mike) and pushes on with a hearty ardour before the detumescent coda, it’s one of the most thrilling three and a half minutes in popular music.

While Riddle recognised it as a ‘cornerstone recording for both him and me’, Neal Hefti, the great Basie arranger, said ‘no one has come close to what Nelson achieved with Sinatra … God! That enthusiasm just keeps going on and on and on!’