Word: sinatra
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...famously fast-paced, tuneful bebop quintet. A longtime member of the Oscar Peterson trio--hailed by many critics as the best ensemble of its kind--Brown, a generous mentor to younger musicians, later played in an early incarnation of the Modern Jazz Quartet. He collaborated with vocalists like Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, left, who became his wife, and performed on some 2,000 recordings, including the early signature One Bass...
...Astaire the singer; that takes some getting used to. His voice was thin, reedy, not quite suited for the high notes or large gestures of the standard tenor. But that was his genius: even before Bing Crosby, Astaire democratized singing. "Almost every great male icon of the art - Crosby, Sinatra, Torm?, Bennett - takes from Astaire," writes Steve Schwartz on Classical Net. "The male pop singer B.F. (before Fred) sounded something like an Irish tenor. ... The limitations of Astaire's voice forced him to find another way - deceptively casual, never oversold, and at home with the American vernacular. Astaire moved...
Once, the boxed sets were regatherings of material previously scattered in a variety of places. But we're way past that now. Take the just-released Sinatra in Hollywood (Reprise/Turner), a six-disc anthology of Frankie's film singing. It is no small accomplishment that its producers persuaded the movie studios who hold the rights to this material to allow a raid on their vaults. Some of what the producers found--a few songs from an abortive cartoon version of Finian's Rainbow, Soliloquy from Carousel, a film Sinatra walked out on--is interesting, if not top-notch, Frank...
...happened on a movie set, it's here: Sinatra introducing a screechy Eddie Hodges on a promotional spot for A Hole in the Head; Sinatra in a duet with (honest) Shelley Winters; Sinatra--well, where is he while we listen to some incidental music out of From Here to Eternity? Almost all the great movie songs (and there are plenty here) arrive in inferior versions--no surprise when you remember that Sinatra would do 10, even 20 takes in a studio to get something right for one of his records, hardly the standard on Hollywood sound stages...
...producer Charles Granata is a first-rate Sinatra scholar, with a scholar's interest in the details. Same for the exceptionally knowledgeable critic Will Friedwald, who contributes an essay. But having Granata and Friedwald expend their energies on this material is like having Stephen Hawking explain why the little hand counts the hours and the big hand counts the minutes. For the rest of us, it's just a matter of being suckered. --By Daniel Okrent