I doubt the sound quality would pass the forums test, but I do wish they’d do a full reissue of Sinatra’s Capitol catalog on CD, using the right tapes and correcting mixing issues of past outings.
I am curious now... What would a Trilogy Deluxe include? I am spinning the original pressing of Trilogy right now... Not one of my favourite Sinatra albums (that third LP in particular... is very weird), but I play it sometimes. Would a Deluxe re-release include some previously unreleased material?
They've already released some of Trilogy's tracks with a new mix, they could follow suit with the rest of the album. They could include the already-released "Surrey" attempt, as well as the rest of the July tracks from The Past that he revisited later. If the 1978 sessions still exist for "You and Me" and "Remember" and "That's What God Looks Like," they could include those. There is also a smattering of live recordings from that period they could include as well. And who knows what else exists, I'd love to hear some session work from "The Future." There's some great photos from the sessions that I've seen online. It would be a great package. But I have a feeling it will never come to pass.
Somewhere in a thread about Trilogy or maybe even in this one I long ago wrote that I thought "The Future" was a huge masterpiece and that the the major issue with the 3 disc set is "The Present". Why? Because 90 % of it has songs from the past in it! (Sorry, but counting 1950-1980 as the present does not compute). Plus some of the "contemporary" tunes he did were embarrassing...i.e. "Song Song Blue", and "For the Good Times" done in a very bad duet and an absolute funeral dirge tempo! (He had the tune in his "book" for a while and performed it solo which was far more acceptable). Also in the book during the '77-'80 period were actual new tunes such as "There's Something About You", "Never Gonna Fall in Love Again", "Empty Tables", "I Sing the Songs", "All By Myself", "I Love My Wife", and "Everybody Ought to Be in Love" which immediately come to mind, and there are other songs as well. For those who despise or are not-too-sure about "The Future", I suggest a listen to this 2014 podcast titled "Frank Sinatra in Outer Space" where a young fan who is not too enamoured with the songs for which he is most famous is absolutely thrilled to have him take a whack at something so off-beat and challenging at that point in his career. You Must Remember This Episode 2: Frank Sinatra in Outer Space — You Must Remember This (youmustrememberthispodcast.com) Give it a listen...I think you will enjoy it!
I do agree with you, though I think the Present fits in to Sinatra’s self-portrait that he was creating with that album. It’s a 3 part journey, and going from the classics, to the cheesy late 60s Frank, to the avant garde album artist on disc 3 seems to satisfy all sides of him as a performer.
still waiting for the deluxe cd reissue of the wee small hours (no idea if there's any potential bonus material, but the older i get, the more i feel like it's my favorite album ever, by anyone). smitquest
I love that podcast episode. The Future really confuses and delights people to this day. As for The Present, you've landed on, for me, the weakest two tracks on the set and you're spot on about both. However, aside from that, the quality of the performances and the material make it a perfectly fine album. Could the approach have been a little better? I understand exactly what you're saying. Remember, Maybe This Time, the Hungry Years, etc, would have made for fine additions. But I think all of those songs represented more contemporary songwriting styles than what was showcased on The Past, as opposed to chronology---with the exception of Love Me Tender, the reason for whose inclusion otherwise makes sense. Sinatra's post-retirement output really confuses me. It's all over the place in terms of his attitude. He really wasn't comfortable finding material to record, and wasn't confident that the record company or the public was going to embrace it. It's too bad that his circle was so insular, because he really could have used some new voices--not that he would have necessarily listened to them. Someone once responded to my complaint that Sinatra really could have taken a page out of Tony Bennett's book with regard to his openness and taste for new songs that weren't just "Hit Parade" pablum by saying: the stakes were always higher for Sinatra when he made a record. Sinatra viewed himself as a singer of popular songs, and he didn't understand that popular songs just weren't written for singers like him any longer. And by the time Sinatra Jr. came around, who really could have gotten Sinatra Sr., into newer material that could have worked for him, he was too old to take advantage.
I don't think much exists in terms of "extras." (Paul, correct me if I'm wrong." I think outtakes started getting preserved at Capitol shortly after these sessions. (The actual date of when the policy changed is floating around one if these threads, IIRC.) Do we need "Just as a Stranger" tacked on?
Actually, I think that the policy change I'm thinking of is when they began preserving both sets of master reels, rather than running two tape machines, but only preserving the reels from one of them, and I think that that started after CLOSE TO YOU. One set of reels was edited to create the album reels, and the other set was preserved intact. (This is way back in the cobwebs of my brain somewhere. I could be wrong.) EDIT: one reason I put stuff on my website is so bad as my brain begins resting, the information is still there.
Changing topic... I have an original pressing of "Cycles", and it has a really weird stereo mix, with Frank's voice all in the left channel. It's really... disorienting. Are there any re-releases on vinyl which have a more "traditional" mixing?
It has been released officially on an add-on EP to "Ultimate Sinatra: The Centennial Collection." The EP was included in the Japanese pressing of that set and in the download version (but probably only in the EU). I very much doubt that a new "Trilogy" set would sound better than what we have now. It would be interesting for the unreleased material, yes, but if the "new" version of "New York, New York" is what the entire album would sound like, it's hardly an improvement.
Bless you for raising the topic of To Be Perfectly Frank. The tracks are actually studio recordings. The program was recorded in a studio, as well, and then played on air from platters. ABC Studios, if I remember correctly? I have about 74 tracks on 3 different CD's. There's some overlap on each CD. These sessions are a major artistic achievement and a major event in Sinatra's career. To do nothing with them is an artistic crime tantamount to throwing tomato sauce on a Van Gogh. I want the Sinatra estate to work on restoring and releasing the To Be Perfectly Frank sessions. I've asked Mr. Granada to give leadership to the project. But nobody does anything, nor says a word about it. All these years of getting no response one way or another. It's so exasperating.
If memory serves, the Cycles album was the only Sinatra album released that utilized the Haeco-CSG encoding process. Cycles was recorded and released at the time record labels were trying to eliminate the simultaneous release of mono and stereo versions of the same album to cut inventory and save money. In the very broadest terms, the Haeco-CSG process was an attempt to combine aspects of a mono and stereo album into one record so labels only needed to release one version of an album. If interested in the technical aspects of the process, you can read about it on Wikipedia. Recordings that were issued using this process could sound downright bizarre- some of the anomalies included a narrow stereo soundstage, the tone of a recording could be altered, and vocals could just sound very strange and off center. Needless to say, the utilization of this process was dropped rather quickly, and labels went on to issue only stereo versions of their albums subsequently labeled something like “Stereo- playable on Monophonic Equipment.” To this day (as I understand it), every rendering of Sinatra’s Cycles album (and any song included on the album) is the Haeco-CSG encoded version (including the CD release). No one ever bothered to remove the encoding. However, it is interesting to note, that with modern home computers and software, and a little know how, most people can remove the Haeco-CSG processing, on any encoded album, themselves with fairly good results. Whether the processing is part of your problem is hard to say, but just be aware that currently, all versions of Cycles could sound a little different from any other Sinatra album because it utilizes this process
Thank you, your description exactly fits what I hear (and it's especially troubling with headphones). Turning on the "mono" switch on my preamp fixes the off-center voice, but makes the orchestra muffled. The software solution would probably indeed fix the whole mix, but my vinyl chain is completely analogue... so I will have to keep it this way. Curiously, "Cycles" is marked "stereomono" indeed on the label: the other Sinatra album with the "stereomono" marking that I have is the wonderful Sinatra/Jobim collaboration... but luckily, that one sounds great (and I would have been very pissed otherwise, as I markedly prefer it to "Cycles"). I am re-listening to all the 50+ original pressings of Sinatra albums (Columbia, Capitol and Reprise) that I have inherited from my father years ago and which I brought to a new life with a record washing machine, and luckily many have stood the test of time and repeated play!
I believe it was brought up numerous times on the SFF. They don't seem to want to have anything to do with it. Why that is I don't know maybe they felt it wouldn't profit them. Big mistake I think.
I think the Estate could stand to release the long discussed '64 Sands 'test' shows they recorded in December with Basie and Q. This is where all those wonderful John Dominis shots came from. Ric Ross had a great copy of it in his collection -- so it exists. Even if they couldn't justify a physical release, a digital release of this would be monumental. Particularly as it has Frank doing live versions of Basie charts not heard outside of the albums.
"The Estate" no longer has any say in what is released on Capitol or Reprise. It is now all property of UMe.
