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ALBUM: L.a. Is My Lady Lyrics
By:
Frank sinatra
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After You’ve Gone
Best of Everything
Best Of Everything, The
How Do You Keep The Music Playing
Hundred Years from Today, A
If I Should Lose You
It’s All Right With Me
L.a. Is My Lady
Mack The Knife
Stormy Weather
Teach Me Tonight
Until The Real Thing Comes Along
L.a. Is My Lady Reviews
Simply Great!
Frank Sinatra hits another homerun with this 1984 album that wasn`t released on a compact disc until relatively recently!This great Sinatra cd was orchestrated by the fabulous Quincy Jones and Orchestra.This cd features such jazz musicians as george benson,bob james and lionel hampton.Recorded at A and R studios on the seventh floor of a new york city office building the Sinatra sound comes to life!Quincy Jones first takes us through a new journey with the songs L.A.Is My Lady and The Best Of Everything.Sinatra is never better singing the ballads How Do You Keep The Music Playing and Stormy Weather.Frank then adds some new twists to the old classic Mack The Knife.Theres 11 great songs on this supercharged cd.A must for all Sinatra fans!
Frank Should Have Called It Quits Prior To Tiis Fiasco
The seventy year old Sinatra sounds horrible. Unlike Perry Como or Bing Crosby who were crooners and not belters, Sinatra's voice did not grow old gracefully. In this CD, "L.A. Is My Lady," Sinatra sounds like an old, deteriorating singer still trying to hang on and sound "hip." Instead, his version of "Teach Me Tonight" sounds like a funeral dirge, and Sinatra's attempt at Bobby Darin's "Mack the Knife" is a travesty: Frank can't even keep his voice from quivering as he tries to match the vocal gymnastics of the much younger and more rythmic Darin. The whole album is humiliating and only diehard Sinatra fans would disagree, since thier misplaced loyalty to Sinatra blinds thier common sense. Don't waste your money!
Frank Trying to Be Bobby is
I agree with the music fan from Philly. "Mack the Knife" belongs to Bobby Darin, and Sinatra's attempt at the classic tune is a disaster. I still can't fathom how nobody in the studio told Frank what an embarrassing job he was doing on that recording! The young Frank had a smooth yet powerful voice----and it was this period in his career that established him as a supreme vocalist. But as his voiced aged and deepened, he needed to rely more on style than natural tonal quality. And even at this point in his career (Capitol Records--late 1950s and early 1960s)he did a marvelous job. However, Bobby Darin is kind of a unique and tragic story. While even the young Darin never had Frank's silky and powerful pipes, he did have a fine voice of his own as well as tremendous talent as a vocal stylist. Darin was also imbued with an uncanny sense of rhythm and an unmatched ability to add pizzazz to his recordings. Hence, Darin's "Mack the Knife" is a true, genuine classis that should not be attempted by any other singer unless he or she is willing to suffer the ridicule resulting from the one-sided comparison. Sadly, Bobby died at only 37 years old, after years of personal illness and emotional sadness. But in the two years before his finally succumbing to life-long heart disease, Bobby was making a universally-applauded comeback. Had he lived another decade or two, I truly believe his later years would have propelled him past Sinatra as an all-around song stylist with stage presence and magneticism that even Sinatra could not surpass. What we should acknowledge, at the very least, is that Bobby's version of "Mack" is the definitive one, as not even Frank could come close to matching Darin's outstanding performance.
Let's face it, Sinatra is an icon, and icons can attempt anything and a certain percentage of the public will accept the end result----no matter how horrendous. Such is the case with Sinatra's embarrassing version of "Mack the Knife." Both Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong did far better versions, and of course, THE DEFINITIVE VERSION belongs to Bobby Darin. The sixty-five year old Sinatra cannot compete with the twenty-two year old Darin on "Mack." Indeed, I'm not so sure the twenty-two year old Sinatra would have been able to compete with the young Darin (prior to his soon to worsen heart condition), since the tragic Darin had such an uncanny sense of timing, rythym, and vocal improvisation. Some songs belong to one singer, and they should therefore be left alone. Even as legendary a figure as Sinatra should have known better than to apply his crackly, strained, off-key voice to the Darin classic. Frank sounds like an old fart trying to be hip---unnatural. Further, despite all the hype about arranger Quincy Jones, his charts on "Mack" pale in comparison with those of Darin's arranger, Richard Webb. Sinatra's version is strained, loud, blaring, and monotonous. I think you get the picture. Darin's and Webb's version had feeling, syncopation, and verve. Sinatra's and Jones's has none of these attributes---just unbearable volume that culminates in the instruments sounding like a tidal wave of noice---discordant and out of tempo. The rest of the album is OK, but nothing to write home about. Frank's best material is from his Capitol years.
Uncool,
What a difference twenty years makes. In 1964, the young Quincy Jones arranged superlative charts for an album with Count Basie which included two tracks that went on to be Sinatra staples: "Fly Me To The Moon" and "The Best is Yet To Come." The latter song's title foretells the opposite of this collaboration: what was to come were the single worst batch of arrangements in the Sinatra canon. Only "Mack the Knife" stayed in Sinatra's concert set list, and with Satchmo, Ella and Bobby Darin unable to complain too much the song became Sinatra's property by default (after all, Bobby WAS trying to be like Frank when he sang it). The rest of the cuts, especially the title track, suffer from "smooth jazz" arrangements that are simply bland. Like Burt Bacharach's work around this time, the urge to sound contemporary in a Light AC Radio sort of way overshadows these proceedings for the worse. Listeners might also be put off by Sinatra's deepening voice and propensity to project his vocals on every take (Tony Bennett has this same problem these days, only worse: he shouts at full volume at the start of *every* song and is obligated to a BIG finish at the top of his lungs.) On all the tracks, they're sung with full force almost as if he's belting out these songs; no delicate phrasing here. With the digital compression, added reverb and other processing, Sinatra's vocals have no dynamics whatsoever. This is especially obvious during "How Do You Keep The Music Playing", as the soft piano intro is soon greeted by Frank's bulldozing vocal reminiscent of Vaughn Monroe or Frankie Laine shouting in a canyon, and destroying the mood. The sad part about this is that since he can't tackle the frilly love songs, he could've sure swung like mad with a blastin' big band back behind him. But noooooooooooo! Quincy's gotta show how much of a cool cat artiste he is (even though he farmed out most of these charts) because he produced "Thriller." He shoulda taken out his old LP with Frank and Basie and used that as a guide. A serious mis-step for all involved, redeemable only because even at his worst, Sinatra is the best there ever was.
This album received a lot of publicity when it came out in 1984, chiefly because of the title track, a rather obvious attempt to rack up another hit along the lines of "Chicago" and "Theme from New York, New York." Much better, however, are Sinatra's renditions of standards such as "How Do You Keep the Music Playing?," "Mack the Knife," and "Stormy Weather." Sinatra's voice is showing its age, but his masterful phrasing repeatedly saves the day. Unfortunately, the musical backing (by Quincy Jones and his Orchestra, which includes such luminaries as George Benson, Lionel Hampton, and Urbie Green) is nauseatingly slick; there's very little of the give-and-take between singer and band that marked Sinatra's finest work.
--Dan Epstein
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