Sinatra at the Sands

This deluxe production has excellence right through it: Sinatra near his peak; Basie and his band; Quincy Jones conducting & arranging. The recording quality is first-rate too, and puts the listener right in the room that "has that peculiar air about it that only successful clubs have: a combination of cigarette smoke, overheated air, smouldering dust, Lysol Clorox cleaned linen, even the silverware smells different from home silverware" to quote Stan Cornyn's notes in the gatefold.

As well as instantly-recognisable songs like 'Come Fly With Me' and 'It Was a Very Good Year', there are also a few brief, but thrilling Basie instrumentals, and a pair of Sinatra's monologues - one longer ('The Tea Break'); one shorter ('A Few Last Words'). Collectively these do heighten the sense of a single evening's entertainment, but would it have been any less of a record had the monologues been omitted? Nat 'King' Cole's At The Sands a contemporaneous release (but recorded some years earlier), has very little in the way of stage patter, and is hardly any less effective an album than this.

This double LP, a late-'60s German re-issue in great condition, was among those I bought in the first few years of the century during my time in Sweden. I think I may have already had the Classic Sinatra CD compilation at that point, but this was my first taste on Sinatra on vinyl.

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Complete String Quartets

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Onslow

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Influencías

In my original blogging days, I would occasionally run giveaways to offload unwanted books or CDs to whomever claimed them. Sometimes the recipients would offer to send me something in return. It was in this way that, ca. 2007, a Catalan correspondent sent me Influencías: a CD of perfomances by the Barcelona-based Cuarteto Casals. The CD begins with Maurice Ravel's renowned string quartet: I hadn't known the piece before receiving this disc, but I was sold on it by this fresh & bright performance. Next is a quartet called 'Vistes al Mar' by the Catalan composer Eduardo Toldrá. Its evocative maritime movements are prefaced by recitations of poems by Joan Maragall, a Catalan author whose works directly inspired the piece. Lastly there's an arrangement of Joaquín Turina's atmospheric 'Oración del Torero', originally composed for a lute quartet. I'm on the fence about the cover photo: it's a well-composed picture & not a bad idea, but with 2...

This is a Recording

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