In The Wee Small Hours By Frank Sinatra

Released in 1955 when most albums were just collections of individual songs, “Wee Small Hours” was a concept album – more than the sum of its parts. The songs fit together and are well-sequenced. Sinatra and Nelson Riddle intended this music to be listened to as an album, though it’s true that individual songs did extremely well on the radio. You’ve probably read that Sinatra’s marriage to Ava Gardner was disintegrating during this period; Sinatra was heart-broken by Gardner’s infidelities, despite having affairs of his own during this time. The songs are about failed relationships, lost love, and loneliness. On the cover is a sad-looking Sinatra on a lonely, unnamed city street in the middle of the night, by himself, looking pensively downward.

Nelson Riddle’s orchestral arrangements on this album are amazing, and the orchestral mix is perfect. Riddle’s orchestrations and the melancholy vibe throughout really transport you to another era.

The vinyl pressing of this Capital reissue is very good. There is very little surface noise. The record is perfectly flat and the grooves are perfectly centered around the spindle hole. The record is in mono, as it was made in 1955, just a year or two before the stereophonic era began. While I much prefer stereo to mono, I find that my ears adjust to the mono very quickly; then I forget it’s not stereo and I just enjoy it. The sound quality is phenomenal for a recording from the 1950s–warm and airy with good soundstage and good separation between Frank’s voice and the various sections of Nelson Riddle’s orchestra.

This recording is available on CD, too, and if both had the same sound quality I would choose the CD for the greater convenience of digital. But for this record, I strongly recommend the vinyl LP over the CD. The CD sounds good compared to other CDs of recordings from this period. But the CD isn’t as warm-sounding and doesn’t have as much dynamic range as the LP. Plus, as Trent Reznor says and it’s especially apt here, this record is a physical object that exists with you in the real world, not just a bunch of 0s and 1s that can streamed over the internet or stored on your phone and listened to with less intense attention while you check your emails and stock prices and weather. Nope. The vinyl demands your full attention, and rewards you with a real experience.

A great record, highly recommended–especially on vinyl.

Remasters sound excellent. Understated orchestra supporting the songs and voice perfectly

Although it’s a mistake to overlook Sinatra’s 1940s/Columbia period (the Tommy Dorsey phrasing! the vocal mastery of “If You Are but a Dream”!), “In the Wee Small Hours” is the first of a series of Capitol dates that must be considered not merely the apex of Sinatra’s artistry but the most convincing evidence available in support of the American popular song as a unique, complex, infinitely expressive art form of the highest order. The only argument remaining is the place of this first Sinatra/Riddle achievement with respect to those that would follow.

Practically each of the Capitol sessions–including those orchestrated by Jenkins, May, Stordahl–deserves consideration, and it’s no exaggeration to claim each as a masterwork. Perhaps “Only the Lonely” is the consummate example of the potential of the long-playing album as a complete, thematically-linked whole–a collection of popular songs arranged so as to form a single wondrous “tone poem.” And given the fragmentation of the “album” by the new age of digital technology, it’s a recording that, much like Duke Ellington’s greatest suites, is unlikely to be repeated–a high-water mark in American popular music. Nevertheless, the Sinatra-Riddle magic is no less in evidence on the individual selections comprising “In the Wee Small Hours.” There’s no end of sweet and sentimental, basically bland treatments of “I’ll Never Be the Same,” but Sinatra’s meditative reading and Riddle’s inspired counter-motifs (reminiscent of the evocative score to Chris Marker’s film about time and change “La Jetee”) ensures a performance of “I’ll Never Be the Same” that is anything but the same. And if Sinatra-Riddle can perform miracles with mundane material, imagine the results when the song is representative of a composer’s very best.

Harold Arlen’s “Last Night When We Were Young” is a single-sentence meditation on the passage of time, moving from measured contemplation to agitated anguish if not despair. Most singers will think twice, however, before performing a lyric that reaches its musical climaxes on upper-register notes bearing the short-vowel, throat-closing sounds of the words “think” and “clung.” At best, they might perform the tune at a slightly brisker tempo and choose to emphasize the vowel-friendly words. Not Old Blue. He slows it to a meterless tempo and requires only a single pass to realize the full impact of the lyric’s internal drama, drawing out the eternity of “aaaages ago” before delivering the bracing, extended “thiiiink” (the discovery that the past has slipped away) and following it with a “cluuunng” so powerful it suggests less the subject’s desperation than his victory over time.

They tell me songs and performances such as this were once considered pop music. Perhaps when Shakespeare was the entertainer of his day.

Actually, the very first ‘concept’ album. The idea being you put this record on after dinner and by the last song you are exactly where you want to be. Sinatra said that he’s certain most baby boomers were conceived with this as the soundtrack.

On a top level state of the art system, Frank’s in your living room. Dead quiet. Better be dressed.

PERFETTO!

Mi disco llegó en muy buenas condiciones y lo mejor, la caja es de plástico y no de cartón, estoy muy satisfecha