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ОглавлениеFrank Sinatra
The Voice Of Frank Sinatra
The Voice Of The Century pioneers the vinyl pop LP.
Record label: Columbia
Produced: Manny Sachs
Recorded: Hollywood; July 30, 1945 and New York City; December 7, 1945
Released: March 4, 1946
Chart peaks: None (UK) 1 (US)
Personnel: Frank Sinatra (v) Axel Stordahl and his Orchestra
Track listing: You Go To My Head; Someone To Watch Over Me; These Foolish Things (Remind Me Of You); Why Shouldn’t I?; I Don’t Know Why (I Just Do); Try A Little Tenderness; (I Don’t Stand) A Ghost Of A Chance; Paradise
Running time: 23.21
Current CD: Sony SNY621002 adds: Mam’selle; That Old Feeling; If I Had You; The Nearness Of You; Spring Is Here; Fools Rush In (Where Angels Fear To Tread); When You Awake; It Never Entered My Mind; Always; (I Don’t Stand) A Ghost Of A Chance (alternate take)
Further listening: Sing And Dance With Frank Sinatra (1950), the first album that Frank, with arranger George Siravo and producer Mitch Miller, shaped with a microgroove LP in mind. After that, take your pick from the wealth of mainly superb releases through Capitol and Reprise.
Further reading: Sinatra! The Song Is You (Will Friedwald 1995) is the most detailed book on Sinatra’s recording career; his daughter’s Sinatra – An American Legend (Nancy Sinatra, 1995) is the most lavishly illustrated. Also try The Sinatra Teasures (Charles Pignon, 2004); www.blue-eyes.com (fansite)
Download: iTunes
In 1946 you could buy these eight songs on four heavy, perishable, 10-inch, shellac 78rpm discs packaged together in a binder to resemble a book. It was a format known in the trade as an album.
It sold like crazy, for this was the period when ‘Swoonatra’ was cresting his huge first wave of popularity. At the beginning of the decade, the skinny ‘kid’ from Hoboken, New Jersey had made a phenomenal impact upon leaving the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra to go solo. A well-orchestrated publicity campaign attracted pop’s first posse of screaming school-age girls. By the time of these recordings he’d crossed into the affections of adults too and made inroads into a creditable film career with the hit movie Anchors Aweigh. Not surprisingly, when Columbia began releasing 10-inch microgroove long-playing records in early 1949, this was the first pop item to appear in the new format. The collection found Francis Albert Sinatra – aged 30 when these songs were sung – in a romantic mode, interpreting eight standards with the aid of his long-term arranger and conductor, Axel Stordahl, a string quartet, a rhythm section and the oboe of Mitch Miller. They were songs that Sinatra loved, in simple settings – like chamber music – that allowed the singer’s innate tenderness with a lyric to shine (a ploy that Frank would revisit over the years, in particular on the 1956 Close To You sessions with The Hollywood String Quartet). It added up to what is, in effect, the first concept album by a pop performer, a collection of songs about a helpless heart. No matter if a lyric suggested that a girl cared for him, Frank remained the little boy lost, requiring someone to watch over him, not standing a ghost of a chance with the one he cared for most, and reflecting, by means of a few foolish things, on a past attachment gone wrong, the perpetual victim of unrequited love.
Sinatra would record most of these songs again in the ’50s, when he made his reputation as ‘Voice Of The Century’ and when his instrument had the timbre of a wise cello, a little more worldly, but no less susceptible to hopeless affairs of the heart. But here, still a creamy viola, he delivered performances that were simply the state of the post-Crosby pop singing art; passionate but gentle, sexy but vulnerable. Little wonder that an entire generation of adoring females experienced the simultaneous – and no doubt conflicting – arousal of their carnal and mothering instincts.
