Features / Holiday Gift Guide

This week, the a cappella vocal group Pentatonix notched its first-ever number one on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart.  More remarkably, the song was first recorded in 1937, written by a composer-lyricist who died in 1989, and features a vocalist who passed away in 1998.  The song is “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm,” the songwriter is Irving Berlin, and the duet partner is, of course, Frank Sinatra.  With this achievement, Sinatra returned to the top of the AC chart for the first time since September 30, 1967, when “The World We Knew (Over and Over)” concluded a five-week stay at No. 1. The success of the Pentatonix single is just one more reminder that Sinatra’s enduring influence still looms mightily.  As the expression that’s adorned many a poster goes, It’s Frank’s world.  We just live in it.

Yet the vast – and vastly rewarding – discography of the eternal Chairman of the Board has been rather ill-served in past years, with few projects truly worthy of his legacy.  (Consider this: in the 15+ years since The Second Disc launched, there has not been one super deluxe-style set of any album by Frank Sinatra, the man who not only launched the long-playing format for pop music but elevated the album into an art form.  There weren’t any before TSD launched, either, though there have been plenty of compilations and remixed single-disc expansions.)  That has changed in recent months thanks to the valiant efforts of SING (an offshoot of a blockchain tech company, of all things).  The feisty indie label has released three titles from the golden age of American radio and the ground floor of the Frank Sinatra legend, all newly restored from broadcast sources in ear-opening quality.  Frank Sinatra at The Hollywood Bowl 1943-1948 and Christmas on the Air, both on CD, have been joined by a lavish, vinyl-only 5-LP box set, Long Ago, Far Away (1943-1951), which contains the entirety of the Hollywood Bowl disc and a “highlights” version of the Christmas set, plus other rare material from The Voice, or Young Blue Eyes.

At The Hollywood Bowl preserves his performances from various evenings at the storied venue including a lengthy set on August 14, 1943 in which he offered some of the songs most associated with him throughout his lifetime including Arthur Altman and Jack Lawrence’s “All or Nothing at All” (a million-selling chart-topper the same year for Sinatra) and Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s “The Song Is You” from Music in the Air.

The collection draws extensively on the Broadway repertoire of the era with beautiful interpretations from the young artist of such classics as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “If I Loved You” and “Soliloquy” from Carousel; Kern and Hammerstein’s “Ol’ Man River” from Show Boat (which Sinatra would memorably perform on screen in MGM’s 1946 Kern biopic Till the Clouds Roll By and reinvent, like “Soliloquy,” with added gravitas on the towering 1963 album The Concert Sinatra); Irving Berlin’s “The Girl That I Marry” from Annie Get Your Gun; Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” from Gay Divorce; and the Gershwins’ “Embraceable You” from Girl Crazy.  Jack Haley, the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, introduces Sinatra’s performance of Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne’s “Time After Time” at the August 8, 1948 Music for the Wounded benefit concert.

These striking performances from the young vocalist reveal the purity of a powerful and distinctive voice not yet burnished by whiskey and cigarettes.  The magnetic, even spellbinding, vocal quality of the young Sinatra put him head and shoulders above his contemporaries as he honed the art of interpretive singing.  He was unafraid, even at this early stage of his career, of injecting himself into his music – personalizing it, fully embodying a lyric, and seeing that the bar was set impossibly high for the many others who surveyed the same material.  Sinatra would later hone a new persona for a swingin’ era, but the period covered by these SING releases finds a vocalist both sensitive to the world around him and to the song itself.  One can’t imagine the later Sinatra, for instance, covering much of the material on Christmas on the Air with the same zest.

The full CD presentation of Christmas on the Air offers a wealth of yuletide delights originally heard on radio between 1943 and 1951.  These include what’s believed to be the earliest-known recording of him singing “White Christmas” (from December 19, 1943, even before his first of two Columbia recordings of the Irving Berlin instant classic); “Let It Snow!” in both brassy and ballad modes; a unique arrangement of “Jingle Bells” that’s quite different than the one heard on the radio Christmas after Christmas; a 1951 performance of “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm” that anticipates the later, brasher Sinatra sound; and even a playful romp through “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth” from 1949.  (Note the latter, punctuated by the sound of screaming bobbysoxers!)

There are plentiful duets (FS and Dorothy Kirsten on a spirited “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” June Hutton on the jaunty “Button Up Your Overcoat,” Eileen Barton on a second “Jingle Bells”) and novelties including sketches and a parody of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” captured two years before Sinatra recorded his definitive recording of the song.  A vocal version of “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers” is among the material never recorded by Sinatra in the studio, and it’s a charming treat.  A reflection of his deep faith, the young singer is moving and reverent on “Ave Maria” and “The Lord’s Prayer,” and touching on “Going Home,” a classically-inspired piece that provided solace to our troops during World War II and after.

Especially on the full CD presentation, there’s the flavor of an actual radio broadcast with plenty of jokes about Frankie’s slender physique and messages in the spirit of goodwill.  Christmas music was a mainstay of Sinatra’s career, from 1948’s Christmas Songs by Sinatra through 1968’s The Sinatra Family Wish You a Merry Christmas all the way up to 1991’s “Silent Night.”  These broadcast performances add a whole new chapter to this already extraordinary part of the Sinatra discography – and just might leave you swooning, “Oh, Frankie!”  The vinyl version of Christmas on the Air included in the Long Ago, Far Away box set includes 13 of the CD’s 22 tracks.

Long Ago, Far Away is rounded out by various other key radio and live performances that paint an even fuller portrait of this foundational period of Sinatra’s career.  The March 28, 1945 broadcast of CBS’ Songs by Sinatra celebrated the United States Military with a stirring program including two songs he never recorded in the studio (“Easter Parade” and “Ave Maria”), the romantic “I Fall in Love Too Easily” from MGM’s Anchors Aweigh, and a captivating reading of the Gershwins’ “Someone to Watch Over Me.”  (The orchestra of Axel Stordahl must be commended here, too!)  A salute to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt yielded a beguiling take on Kurt Weill and Ogden Nash’s “Speak Low” from their score to Broadway’s One Touch of Venus; Sinatra never cut it in the studio.  From CBS’ The Stage Door Canteen comes a rare performance of Jerry Livingston, Carl Lampl, and Al Hoffman’s “Close to You” recorded just ten days after Sinatra brought it to life for Columbia Records.  Yet the performance here has a full chart by Axel Stordahl where the Columbia version employed just The Bobby Tucker Singers as a result of the AFM recording ban.  (Sinatra revisited the song as the title of his 1957 Capitol album.)

The rarest of all Sinatra’s radio shows, CBS’ Meet Frank Sinatra, is represented with the music from the November 12, 1950 show which featured two songs – Ned Washington and Victor Young’s “Can’t We Talk It Over” and Jay Livingston and Ray Evans’ “I’ll Always Love You” – otherwise unrecorded in his oeuvre.)

What makes these recordings even more special is the abundant care that’s gone into the restoration and mastering for SING’s releases.  Engineer Harry Hess has employed current audio separation technology to, in effect, remove Sinatra’s voice from the original recordings, create a new vocal stem, and then return it to the track with a proper vocal/orchestral balance once thought impossible to achieve.  While there are some variances in sound quality throughout, the results are genuinely revelatory; it’s difficult to believe that many of these recordings date back over three quarters of a century.

That loving attention to detail extends to the comprehensive liner notes by Sinatra historian (and current host of Sinatra Standard Time on Jazz 88.3 KSDS-FM San Diego) Charles L. Granata, who most recently brought his expertise to Impex’s multi-format, audiophile-quality reissue of the Columbia album Sing and Dance with Frank Sinatra.  In his essay, Granata (also the longtime producer of SiriusXM’s late, lamented Nancy for Frank program and the guiding light behind most of Columbia/Legacy’s Sinatra reissues over the past three decades) goes into welcome detail about how these recordings have survived as well as why they’re so significant in the context of both Sinatra’s career and the wider culture.

With Long Ago, Far Away (1943-1951) as well as the standalone CD release of Christmas on the Air and the CD and single-LP editions of Live at The Hollywood Bowl, SING has added mightily to the too-often-neglected Frank Sinatra discography.  (And with any luck, the currently vinyl-only material will, too, find its way to the CD format.)  To fully understand the artist of Songs for Swingin’ Lovers, Ring-a-Ding-Ding, Francis Albert Sinatra and Antonio Carlos Jobim, and She Shot Me Down, one needs to explore his early years.  Alongside the groundbreaking The Columbia Years box, A Voice in Time, and A Voice on Air, SING’s new Long Ago, Far Away is essential.  It may be long ago and far away, but the young Frank Sinatra has never seemed closer.

All titles are now available from Sing Market.