1. Frank Sinatra - In the Wee Small Hours (1955)

A: In the Wee Small Hours//Mood Indigo//Glad to be Unhappy//I Get Along Without You Very Well//Deep in a Dream//I See Your Face Before Me//Can't We Be Friends?//When Your Lover Has Gone

B: What is this Thing Called Love?//Last Night When We Were Young//I'll Be Around//Ill Wind//It Never Entered My Mind//Dancing on the Ceiling//I'll Never Be The Same//This Love of Mine

As well as being a beautiful accomplishment in its own right, In the Wee Small Hours represents on a formal level the “arrival”, as it were, of the album as album. In 1955, the LP format was still relatively new – Columbia had debuted the 33 1/3 RPM long-player in 1948, appropriately reissuing Sinatra’s own The Voice as their first pop 10”. But for most people, this was just a more convenient way of packaging their songs. Artists and record companies didn’t tend to consider their albums as cohesive wholes or unified artistic statements where the songs fir together to tell a story or sustain a mood. This was understandable, given that the preceding format (which continued well into the fifties) had been, quite literally, albums. Bundles of 78s, at first, and then 33 1/3 and 45 RPM extended-players, packing a whopping two songs a side as opposed to the 78’s one, and collected into packets like a photo album. A somewhat fragmentary approach is therefore understandable – almost everyone was in the habit of thinking of the song as more or less stand-alone.

Now, Sinatra may not have invented the concept album (So and So Sings the Works Of packages had been around a while), but he did pioneer it as a form, and In the Wee Small Hours constitutes the first perfect crystallisation of his approach. It was the first 12” he recorded, and he decided to do things a bit differently. He’d been working on this whole “album as a cohesive whole” thing for a while, and this gave him a nice opportunity to do things right. As a consequence, this isn’t just a collection of songs – it’s almost a suite.

Taking the recently-completed title track as his starting point, Sinatra worked closely with the arranger Nelson Riddle in building-up a song selection that followed-on from the melancholy attitude of “In the Wee Small Hours”. The album was supposedly structured around Sinatra’s recent break-up with Ava Gardner (and honestly, if you’d lost Ava Gardner you’d be pretty bummed too), with the consequent thread being one of near-suicidal depression and longing. Sinatra and co also took pains to include only songs recorded specifically for this LP, and as a consequence the sound of the album is perfectly consistent.

And what a sound! I have this on vinyl, and the deep, slightly murky quality is a perfect complement to the lush orchestral backings. Despite normally preferring the clarity of a CD, I must bow here to vinyl nuts. The depth of the bass, near-inaudible cello and the sparkling piano all blends together as though it were underwater. It forms a deep red backdrop out of which Frank emerges, sounding almost more like one of the woodwinds he’s sharing space with than a human voice. And the arrangements! For the most part, Riddle doesn’t grand-stand – this is Frank’s show the whole way through, and the music sticks to serving the vocals in a beautiful way. But now and then, something with leap out and drop you. The clarinet opening side-two on “What is the Thing Called Love” leaps out with a gorgeous, hypnotic blues figure that’s doubled throughout the song by a lush set of violins. Elsewhere, bursts of beautiful saxophone soloing appear out of nowhere on *. The last track, “This Love of Mine” closes out on utterly gorgeous banks of strings fading away into a melancholy ocean. It’s reminiscent at times of Gershwin and Ellington (whose “Mood Indigo” is featured), but I don’t see how anyone could call that a bad thing.

Frank’s in fine voice here – he’s never indulgent, delivering his lines with a plain-speaking sincerity, putting just the right amount of emotion into a line without ever dipping over into the sort of over-the-top schmaltz which colours most people’s impressions of the Lounge Singer. Compare the deep, slow delivery on “Mood Indigo” with the snappy, almost conversational “Dancing on the Ceiling”. It’s the sort of song you’d expect Julie London to croon out, but Sinatra rises-up to a restrained yet “big” climax she could never match. And then there’s the gently self-mocking Hart/Rodgers number “It Never Entered My Mind”, where Sinatra delivers a full depth of emotion to the soaring line “And now I even have to scratch my back myself”.

It’s stuff like this that stops In the Wee Small Hours from becoming self-absorbed and tedious. It’s heartfelt, and maybe a little indulgent, but self-aware enough to combat this without losing that genuine quality – it’s often pretty funny, or at least wry. The song selections are top-notch – there isn’t a track worth dropping, and a great deal of variety is present within the self-imposed limitation of all the tracks being ballads (the rambling “Glad to be Unhappy” is a personal favourite of mine, with a gorgeous spoken/sung introduction). The team of Richard Rodgers and Lorenzo Hart get the most tracks, with one on side one and two on side two, “Glad to be Unhappy” and “It Never Entered My Mind” being two of the strongest on the album.

The music on this album is less of a development than the manner in which it has been selected and arranged, but that’s not to say that Riddle’s complex, subtle arrangements aren’t superb. This particular style of lushly-orchestrated jazz pop, married so closely to blues, had been chugging along fine for years with relatively small changes, but would be more or less obsolete by the end of the sixties. Orchestral pop did get by, mostly by more funky) realms, but these sorts of standards-collections have unfortunately at this point in time reached a nadir (Rod Stewart, anyone?). And this collection itself isn’t flawless – as restrained as Frank is his voice does sometimes get a little bigger than the music he’s singing over can support, and while none of the songs are bad, his cover of “Mood Indigo” is a little weak, with the same to be said of “Dancing on the Ceiling”. There’s also the problem that this album is, as much as anything, a mood piece, and so some of the songs can fade into the background if you let them.

In any event, this marks an important moment in the history of popular music. The cohesiveness of the album is almost taken for granted these days, so much so that it’s one of the first things people look for when sitting down to criticise a piece of work. While the actual “concept album” in the prog-rock sense may be something of a mixed blessing, the album as artistic statement has led to some of the most amazing developments around. Could Sgt. Pepper’s exist without this (and would it be a bad thing if it didn’t)? I don’t know, maybe. Who does? More interestingly, could Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson? Would anyone want to live in such a world? Arguably more important is the matter of actually re-recording every single song for this LP specifically – it’s a level of forced dedication that is comparable in importance to the Beatles’ decision to only record songs they’d written themselves.

Thankfully, however, Frank just sings. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. People often look down on people who just sing other people’s songs. But I don’t see why. Frank Sinatra had an amazing voice and a keen artistic sense. Why the hell did he need to write his own songs? He made them his own through the power of his pipes, and the incredibly charisma he put across.

This is a gorgeous piece of work. It’s a masterpiece of understatement and the honest to god sound of a broken heart.

9/10