composed by J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie
Not a few people regard In the Wee Small Hours (1957) as Sinatra’s best album, but, for me, the sound of Sinatra playing an unequivocal sad sack for fifty minutes exhausts my patience just like watching Jack Nicholson play a knucklehead in Prizzi’s Honor. Yes, I believe the performances, but it was worth neither my trouble nor theirs. Sinatra may be most devastating at his most formalistic, when the display of pure technique is most naked, and never more so than on the justly revered ‘50s albums on Capitol arranged by Nelson Riddle of which this was the last. Much of the album, including this number, was material he had already recorded a decade earlier when he was one of the biggest teen idols ever. Even then he was developing peerless breath control by swimming laps in a pool without taking more than a single breath. Here, his long-tempered ability to shape exceedingly lengthy phrases without needing to indicate their boundaries gives the romantic ache the words describe a strange weightlessness: as much as one might enjoy the singer’s pleasure in his fantasy, his cool admission of its hopelessness is somehow just as satisfying, and even more intensely sad.
Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, originally intended to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25, now extended to Twelfth Night (or so).
No comments:
Post a Comment