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Customer Reviews of Sinatra & Company

The CD with the split personality
On the one hand, you have the first seven tracks, consisting of bossa nova tunes performed with the composer Antonio Carlos Jobim. As good as a previous album Sinatra did with Jobim was, these seven songs are even better. Eumir Deodato's arrangements are a little more aggressive than Claus Ogerman's on the first Sinatra/Jobim album. Combined with three songs that didn't make it, "Bonita", "Song of the Sabia", and "Desafinado", all of which are available only on the Reprise box set, this might have been on a top three list of all time Sinatra albums. There are several tracks like "Wave", "Agua de Beber" and "This Happy Madness" that are astonishingly good. "Agua de Beber" is an interesting fusion of swing and bossa nova, in which Sinatra actually sings in Portugese.

Unfortunately, instead of those unreleased bossa nova tracks, Sinatra grafted some mediocre soft rock tunes from the early 1970's onto the second half of the album. "I Will Drink the Wine" is not bad, but "Leavin' on a Jet Plane" and most of the others are just woeful. Sinatra sounds disinterested, and it's not surprising he retired shortly after this album came out.

So you have an album with a split personality. The first seven songs are as good as anything Sinatra ever did, while the last several songs are unworthy of such a great singer. Still, even bad Sinatra is worth hearing.

And it's worth tracking down "Bonita" and "Song of the Sabia" if you can find them. Add those tunes to the songs on the first half of this album, and you will have discovered a lost treasure.

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Sinatra may've made more 'important' LPs, but few as sublime
Although Frank Sinatra's 1967 collaboration with Antonio Carlos Jobim is considered one of the high points of the singer's career, it's not always noticed how fundamentally incompatible both artists are - against the sunny twilight of the bossa nova backing, Sinatra's American straightness can sound alien. The attempt to meld Bossa nova with swing sometimes results in an awkward dilution, but more often creates a tension that makes for fantastic listening.

Among the highlights on a stunning set (comprising out-takes from the 1967 session) are: the famous 'Aqua de Beber', made fresh by the overlapping of Sinatra and Jobim's vocals; the wide-eyed orchestral epiphany that lights up 'Someone to light up my life'; an astonishing 'Wave', still popular music's greatest tribute to the fantasy of love-making, with a gorgeous string surge at mentions of waves, and a knowing nod to 'Makin' Whoopee'; and a witty 'One note samba', that lush urge to minimalism. And these are out-takes!

The second half of the album consists of tracks arranged by Don Costa, and include songs written by John Denver. Many listeners find this creates an imbalance in quality, and certainly this second half, with schmaltzy orchestration lacking the Jobim nuance, and Sinatra's sometimes disengaged singing, misses the magic of the opening eight songs. We can certainly live without another version of 'Close to you', definitive though Sinatra's is.

Nevertheless, there are four songs here that are as good as anything Sinatra has done. 'I Will drink the water', 'Sunrise in the morning' and 'leaving on a jet plane' have all the Vegas drama, unexpected grooviness and melodic rush of late Elvis. 'Lady Day', however, is a staggering, living epitaph to Billie Holiday: strings and harpsichord like the soundtrack to a lost 60s French movie, passion and empathy from one great singer to another.

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Not half bad
I usually maintain that Sinatra albums are of such a thematic and artistic wholeness that to issue them in the form of sampled collections is to a grave disservice to the original projects. If so, "Sinatra and Company" is the exception that proves the rule. Despite a happily conceived Sinatra reading of "Being Green," the second side of this album is benignly irritating (on the other hand, had the material been sung by an Engleburt Humperdinck, Jerry Vale, or Andy Williams it could have been downright nauseating).

Not just Don Costa but Sinatra must share some of the blame for the lapses in judgement that are 50% of this album. The tunes and lyrics are so lame, so much a part of '70's pop culture, that it's almost understandable why Costa would overscore them in garish colors. And whoever the engineer was who mastered the album--washing out Sinatra's voice in the mix and pumping up the bass to ridiculous levels (I can't even reduce it sufficiently when I back off the bass tone control as far as it will go) certainly had to receive Sinatra's approval. In the 50's Old Blue had the integrity not to even pretend to meet the Elvis challenge. So in the 70's why was he trying to emulate Herb Alpert, Burt Bacharach, and the Fifth Dimension?

Side One is also overly loud and thickly textured (the Claus Olgerman session with Sinatra and Jobim is clearly superior), but it contains some indispensable musical moments by the Master Storyteller. No one else has come close to matching Sinatra's passionate reading of "Someone to Light Up My Life" (which should be a popular standard based on the evidence here), to probing the depths of the ocean (a resonant bottom D) on "Wave," or elevating "One Note Samba" from a facile ditty to a musical main event (just dig Blue's vocalese on the second chorus--a rare Sinatra moment).

In short, don't bother with this album unless you already own at least 25 Sinatra albums. Instead, go with "Frances Albert Sinatra and Antonio Carlos Jobim" or, since this latter album is quite short (25-30 minutes?), simply wait for the inevitable release of "Best of Sinatra and Jobim."