Iconblivious: Frank Sinatra - The RCA Years

I'll Be Seeing You (Bluebird RCA, 1994)

1. I'll Be Seeing You; 2. Fools Rush In; 3. It's a Lovely Day Tomorrow; 4. The World Is in My Arms; 5. We Three (My Echo, My Shadow and Me); 6. Dolores; 7. Everything Happens to Me; 8. Let's Get Away from It All; 9. Blue Skies; 10. There Are Such Things; 11. Daybreak; 12. You're Part of My Heart

Frank Sinatra & Tommy Dorsey – Greatest Hits
(RCA Victor, 1996)

1. Night and Day; 2. Imagination; 3. I'll Never Smile Again; 4. Blue Skies; 5. The One I Love (Belongs to Somebody Else); 6. Fools Rush In; 7. Stardust; 8. In the Blue of Evening; 9. Polka Dots and Moonbeams; 10. Without a Song; 11. This Love of Mine; 12. I Think of You; 13. Once in a While; 14. How Am I to Know?; 15. The Sky Fell Down;

Sinatra had been kicking around the music business for a while as a singer for various bands and orchestra before eventually catching a break and becoming the singer for Harry James’ Orchestra, which led to his first released commercial recordings in 1939. While touring with James, he was noticed by Tommy Dorsey, who asked to be one of the singers with his orchestra. Sinatra accepted, debuted with the orchestra in 1940, and started to make a name for himself, both for his talent as a singer and for his good looks, which earned him fame as a teen idol. He would leave Dorsey’s orchestra to try his hand at being a solo star in 1942, but not before recording around 5 CDs worth of material with Dorsey. These songs would be the start of his real evolution as the talented singer he would become and be remembered as.

Listening to this material, the first thing you notice is that…well…

Frank doesn’t really sound like Frank yet.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still clearly Sinatra, but he sounds noticeably different than I would in his 50s/60s prime. Most of this is due to his age: he sounds very youthful on these songs and it certainly fits the teen idol image that he had at the time. More importantly, it’s clear, at least on the earlier songs, that Sinatra hadn’t hit upon his signature style yet. The confidence and brash attitude that’s so prominent in his later recordings hasn’t been developed yet. Instead, he sounds more like any other crooner from the period, especially Bing Crosby, who was clearly a major influence on Sinatra. As someone who’s way more used to Sinatra’s later material, it’s a really weird effect. Kind of like seeing a picture of someone who you only know as an older adult when they were a kid.

The material on these CDs, from what I can tell, paints a pretty good picture of the kind of music Sinatra and Dorsey made during their three years together. Both of the CDs have the same kind of material on it in terms of mood, tempo, feeling, etc., even if they only share two songs between them, and they illustrate what Sinatra and Dorsey did best (or, at least, what they were most famous for).  Of the 25 songs found between these albums, only 8 or 9 can really qualify as being upbeat in any way. Tommy Dorsey was nicknamed “The Sentimental Gentleman” and the songs here show why. Slow, moody, romantic ballads seem to be the band’s forte and dominate both discs. There are upbeat tunes, to be sure, but at least as far as Dorsey’s work with Sinatra goes, ballads tend to win out over more up-tempo stuff. Not that this is bad: Dorsey and Sinatra excel at these kinds of ballads, made with lush arrangements and filled with the kind of elegance and glamour that people associate with Hollywood movies and other entertainment from around the same time. Everything has a kind of glow to it, like it’s being beamed in from another, softer universe where romance was the worst problem anyone had to deal with. (Of course, given that this stuff is relatively light entertainment from early 1940s America, that’s pretty much EXACTLY what it’s supposed to sound like, so…good job, guys).

That said, a part of my wishes that Sinatra and Dorsey had done more upbeat stuff, if only it meant getting more stuff like “Let’s Get Away From It All.” Have you heard “Let’s Get Away From It All?” Cause you should.

It’s some good shit. Admittedly, this is less of a Sinatra/Dorsey song and more of a shared spotlight for several singer who were working with Dorsey’s band at the time (including Connie Haines and mixed-gender vocal group The Pied Pipers), but still, it’s SO GOOD. Everything just blends together so nicely. I kinda wish Dorsey had done more songs like this. All the singers here sound really nice together and I’m surprised Dorsey didn’t do more of these (to my knowledge at least).

The CDs themselves are about what you’d expect for short, inexpensive compilations. They’re both pretty basic: CD, case, and a small booklet/inlay in the front.  I’ll Be Seeing You has a fold-out strip made up of 8 panels, 4 on each side. One side is taken up by the cover art and a 3 panel-long publicity photo of the This Song Is You box set. The panels on the other side are made up of the track listing (on one panel), the liner notes, (on two panels), and a short written ad for the box set that lists all the songs and fancy swag that it comes with. The track list is well done, as it gives the usual writing and publishing credits, as well as when the songs were recorded and what, if any, other singers sang on the song other than Sinatra. The liner notes themselves, written by Will Friedwald, are short, but not too bad. They briefly cover the popularity of the Dorsey/Sinatra pairing and how working with Dorsey ended up influencing Sinatra’s singing style. In a touch I particularly like, it notes that the songs selected for the CD were specifically chosen to be a mix of big hits and more forgotten tracks. It also talks briefly about previous reissues of the Dorsey/Sinatra material and why this reissue improves on the earlier ones. The biggest weakness of the notes is that it’s clear that they’re meant to function more as an ad for the This Song Is You box set and not as much as an independent piece of writing. The relative sparseness of the liner notes certainly makes the box set’s notes, touted as being a “100 page full color book with many rare photos and memorabilia…[and] two major essays and complete studio sessionography” seem all the more appealing just for their (probably) deeper analysis of Dorsey and Sinatra’s music.

The Greatest Hits CD is more or less the same and has, if anything, even sparser information. Of the six panel booklet, one panel is given to the liner notes by Chick Crumpacker, which give a brief overview of Sinatra and Dorsey’s career together and a short biography of each man. Two more panels have the track list, including the songwriting and recordings date information and the credits for who worked on that particular reissue. The booklet and CD case also advertises other CDs in RCA Victor’s jazz-centric “Greatest Hits” line, which this CD is a part of. This suggests that this particular compilation was primarily aimed a neophytes, who would be drawn to the famous names on the front and the spiffy Al Hirschfield caricature on the cover, rather than more seasoned Sinatra/Dorsey fans.

Both of these CDs are technically out of print, but you can pick up inexpensive copies on Amazon and most other online marketplaces. (In store purchasing will, of course, be more of a crap shoot.) I could recommend The Essential Frank Sinatra with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra as a good in-print alternative to these two CDs, but I don’t think I can REALLY recommend a Sinatra/Dorsey CD that doesn’t have “Let’s Get Away From It All” on it. And, of course, the true die-hard can track down the out-of-print, but still fairly easy to find This Song Is You box set, which does away with the whole track list problem by just including everything. If you like this style of music and can find it for a nice price, I’d almost recommend going that route. (Buyer beware, though: This Song Is You came out when cassette tapes were still regularly sold and plenty of the cheaper copies floating around are of the cassette version. If format like that is the kind of thing that’s important to you, be wary if you decide to buy.) But again, unless you know of some particular favorite from that period, almost any compilation will do. No matter what songs are on it, you’ll still get that smooth, glowing Sinatra/Dorsey combination. And really, isn’t that why you’d buy one of these albums anyways?

I find it interesting/telling that that 2-disc Essential set only has a little over half of the songs that appear on I’ll Be Seeing You and Greatest Hits combined. That’s often the trick with these older, pre-33 & 1/3 album acts: their songs, while not always completely interchangeable, were often pretty samey. It’s sometimes more important that Sinatra, Dorsey, & Co. are performing A slow, romantic ballad rather than a PARTICULAR slow, romantic ballad. It also shows, in a certain respect, how little the specific track listings of CDs focusing on this era of Sinatra’s career matter. Each one only bothers to include one of the two biggest hits of Sinatra had with the band (“I’ll Never Smile Again” on Greatest Hits, “There Are Such Things” on I’ll Be Seeing You) and the success that a song had in the 1940s seems to have had little impact on whether or not it would be selected for a CD track list.[1] This is exacerbated by the fact that, well, this isn’t really a well-remembered period of Sinatra’s career in the first place. Unless you were listening to it as it came out in the early 1940s or are a real fan of Sinatra and/or Dorsey and/or big band music in general, you probably don’t have any strong feelings on a specific song that appears on any of these CDs. There aren’t any songs from this period that everyone would expect to be on it, no early ‘40s equivalent of “My Way.” However, don’t let that deter you from seeking out this music. It’s well worth listening too, even if Sinatra and Dorsey are better at capturing a certain kind of style than crafting a specific pop song that only they could have come up with.

(Fun fact: some of this music was mastered from glass parts. Didn’t know you could record sounds to glass. The More You Know!)

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[1] Of course, determining what qualified as a hit in American music prior to 1954, when the Billboard charts as we know them first got organized, is a crapshoot at best. Even the best (and, until very recently, only real) source I found, Joel Whitburn’s Pop Memories 1890-1954, admits that its findings were cobbled together from a variety of sources and involved a certain amount of guess work and approximation to make any of the information useful.