The Very Good Years

Personnel includes: Frank Sinatra (vocals); Bill Miller (piano); Count Basie & His Orchestra.
Recorded between 1960 & 1979. Includes liner notes by William Kennedy.
Contains selections from the "Reprise Years" box set.
A single-disc distillation of the stellar four-disc REPRISE COLLECTION, this album spans the breadth of Frank Sinatra's work for Reprise Records, the label he founded in 1961 to further his artistic and financial freedom. Despite the enormous success Sinatra found in his early career, it was in the early '60s that he reached a real peak in his singing. His voice and phrasing had both ripened to a rewarding maturity, and the sophisticated arrangements of Nelson Riddle and Gordon Jenkins helped Sinatra to merge saloon song with art song, thus creating some of the most richly textured, finely nuanced "pop" recordings ever made.
The brassy swing of "I Get a Kick out of You" and "Luck Be a Lady" show the sheer enthusiasm Sinatra was capable of not only investing but creating on a track. "Strangers in the Night" and "Send in the Clowns" focus on very "grown-up" themes that suited the singer's newly acquired vocal gravitas. "The Summer Wind" and "That's Life" showcase Sinatra's mastery of blending romance, nostalgia, and bitter-sweetness to achieve an emotional complexity hitherto unparalleled in pop music. Big spenders should go whole hog with the 20-disc COMPLETE REPRISE box, and more frugal fans might gravitate to the aforementioned four-discer, but this is an excellent primer for the uninitiated.

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