10/17/2016
Treasures From The Dollar Bin #1
Frank Sinatra, “ In The Wee Small Hours” (1955)
Purchased @ Spoonful Records for $1.00
Spoonful Records on Long Street in Columbus is one of the small music stores where you get personal attention and can find great music in the $1 and $3 bins. On a recent visit, I found the first entry in a New Music Review Series on Thyme In we are simply calling, “Treasures from the Dollar Bin”, Sinatra’s 1955 classic, “In the Wee Small Hours”.
In what many music experts consider the first concept album, “In the Wee Small Hours” was a collection of ballads arranged by Nelson Riddle. The first 12" album recorded by Sinatra, Wee Small Hours is one of the most beautiful albums in the history of recorded music. As near to perfect in terms of writing, recording and performing that you could ever wish to find. Sinatra sounds like a lonely, broken man. Beginning with the newly written title song, the singer goes through a series of standards that are lonely and desolate. The album is a personal reflection of the heartbreak of his doomed love affair with actress Ava Gardner, and the standards that he sings form their own story when collected together. Sinatra's voice had deepened and worn to the point where his delivery seems ravished and heartfelt, as if he were living the songs.
Having been a star for over a decade, Frank Sinatra's career looked like it was over when the 1950s dawned. A bitter dispute with his record label led to his departure from their roster, which meant that not only his recording contract was null and void, but that he was left without a radio show, and could no longer appear in films or on television. Sinatra was dead. The man who looked like he might become the next Bing Crosby had been lost to time.
One man was prepared to give Sinatra another chance - Alan Livingston, the vice president of A&R at Capitol Records, and a major Sinatra fan. He offered Sinatra a 7-album deal, which the man himself gladly snapped up. One problem - Capitol had a roster filled with irrelevant, anachronistic 40s stars. What was to stop Sinatra blending in and becoming just another faded star?
Obviously, history has taught us that Sinatra was a special case in just about every way imaginable. Livingston and his Capitol cohorts, meanwhile, had a master plan that would exploit that to maximum potential. That master plan involved a young composer and arranger named Nelson Riddle.
Forward to 1955. Sinatra had already released two records with Riddle - Swing Easy and Songs For Young Lovers - and had established a pattern for his career of a dance album followed by a melancholy album, followed by a dance album, and so on. This schedule now called for Sinatra to deliver a melancholy album. Not that he'd want to do anything else - his relationship with Gardner had fallen apart spectacularly.
In The Wee Small Hours is often referred to as the first ever concept album. This was Sinatra dealing with how lost and alone he felt when Gardner left him. In an era where albums effectively did not exist - the 12-inch disc was not invented until shortly after the release of in The Wee Small Hours, and when it was invented, this was the album that came to define the medium - In The Wee Small Hours was a revelation. It was the first recording that sustained a mood - any mood - for its entire length. It was the first recording specifically designed to flow the way we now expect albums to. And it was the first recording intended to be listened to one sitting, rather than broken up and digested on a song-to-song level.
His legendary voice is now underpinned not by masculinity, but by longing and sadness. His reading of Hoagy Carmichael's "I Get Along Without You Very Well" is heartbreaking (the emotion invested into the opening couplet is stunning); opener "In The Wee Small Hours of The Morning", written specifically for the album, even more so. The real high watermark, though, is the album's centerpoint. Cole Porter's "What Is This Thing Called Love?" sees him crying, wounded.
You gave me days of sunshine
You gave me nights of cheer
You made my life an enchanted dream
til somebody else came near
Somebody else came near you
I felt the winters chill
And now I sit and wonder night and day
Why I love you still?
The album's concept is a night spent longing for a lost love. Simple but devastatingly effective. Riddle's arrangements throughout are brilliant. They don't jump off the page at all, but they're sympathetic and imaginative - the instrumental sections on "Ill Wind" being a highlight, along with the intro to "I'll Never Be The Same". In fact, oddly enough, Riddle appears to grow into the project as the album goes along - his music gets better and better towards the second half of the record, although there's something magical about the distant, distracted piano intro to "In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning". Make no mistake, though - this is Sinatra's show, and Riddle understands that.
Serious fans of music can be split into two camps - those who own this album, and those who have a big fat gap in their collections. Luckily, for a little bit of searching time and a dollar, I am now in the first group.
