Album Reviews

Frank Sinatra recorded this album for Capitol in the summer of 1960—the same year he left the label and with a few hundred thousand dollars of his own money started Reprise Records. You can be sure plans for the new label were well underway during the production of this thirty three minutes and change long album.

Sinatra and his team at Capitol literally invented the "concept album", whether the concept was travel (Come Fly With Me!) or misery (Sings For Only For the Lonely) but here there really is no concept—unless you count swinging, which Sinatra did on almost all of his records.

So you could think of this as a throwaway end-of-contract album but for my money, it's one of Sinatra's most enjoyable Capitol outings. Sinatra's liberation is at hand and he sings with power and abandon. He's having fun reprising a half dozen songs he previously recorded a decade earlier for Swing and Dance With Frank Sinatra his final Columbia Records album, "When You're Smiling," "It All Depends On You," "It's Only a Paper Moon" and "My Blue Heaven" among them. So okay, you could say that's the "concept", but that's a stretch.

It's important to remember that when Sinatra left Columbia he was considered by many to be a "washed up" teen idol unable to re-calibrate his career and hit the same heights even though he released many superb records during his time at Columbia, where he exercised almost unprecedented control of his output. That is, until the label that forced Rosemary Clooney to sing "Come on a My House" against her will (though it became a huge "novelty" hit), began making similar demands upon Sinatra.

The parting was not pleasant and Sinatra's career took a plunge until in 1953 he won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his work in "From Here to Eternity". His first album for Capitol was released a year later. The four year lag time between records is another kind of eternity in the music business.

During his time at Capitol, Sinatra's re-established himself both as a pre-eminent singer and interpreter of the "American Songbook" and as one of the most important recording artists of the early LP era, releasing a series of albums that remain classics. His voice had deepened to a rich luster and his rise from the depths had burnished his interpretive skills.

No wonder the guy was happy at the end of his Capitol contract! You can hear it in every song on this album, backed by Nelson Riddle and his orchestra. Sinatra was on top, Riddle was on top and Capitol's recording engineers had by then sufficient experience with stereo recording techniques to produce a sonic spectacular.

While it could be argued that some of the early Cap stereos were inferior to their mono counterparts, this one works as a stereo masterpiece. Yes, the orchestra is spread pretty much hard left/right with Sinatra having the center to himself, but the mixers add just the right amount of studio and echo chamber reverb to give both channels richness and depth.

So if you're looking for a way "in" to Frank Sinatra, this would be a great place to start and if you're a fan this one is a great place to continue. Riddle's big band arrangements are aggressive, exuberant and high energy throughout and occasionally whimsical and light-hearted—listen to how he get's out of "I Can't Believe That You're In Love With Me." This was, after all, 1960 and as far as Americans were concerned, the future looked, well, like the future was supposed to look according to the science fiction writers. Though Sinatra's pal John F. Kennedy hadn't yet won, it was clear that a new era was upon us. You can hear it in the grooves of this record.

If you have a clean original pressing of this record, this will not be revelatory, but that's a big "if". A clean original, probably an all-tube mastering, will have a fatter, warmer more explosive bottom end, but other than that, Mobile Fidelity has done a superb job here, and which sounds better, an original or this reissue, will be system dependent. Your original will not likely be as dead quiet as this RTI pressing.