Cool Grooves: A Musical Appreciation of Dean Martin's Capitol Studio Albums, 1953-1962

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the passing of Dean Martin, and his musical legacy keeps going strong. Widely celebrated as the epitome of cool, Martin cut a series of consistently excellent studio albums for Capitol Records in a span of nine years, between 1953 and 1962. Though they did not make as much of an impact on the charts as his later, more commercial work for Reprise, these albums are among the many high points in his career. In this article, I will briefly discuss these eight LPs, which can all be found on CD and should be in the collection of any serious Dino fan.

By 1953, about three years before they dissolved their partnership, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were one of the top acts in the country, a constant presence in nightclubs, movies, and television. As far as records were concerned, Martin had signed with Capitol in 1948 and had concentrated mostly on cutting singles, some of which (particularly "Powder Your Face with Sunshine") were quite successful. It was now time to release a ten-inch LP, called simply Dean Martin Sings (1953), which contained eight songs, all of them from the then-current Martin and Lewis movie, The Stooge. The album was recorded in two sessions held on the same day, November 20, 1953, and it consists of a well-balanced mixture of brassy fast numbers and slow string charts. The latter were recorded first, with Ted Nash's saxophone providing beautiful fills that complement Dino's smooth crooning perfectly on songs such as "I'm Yours," "With My Eyes Wide Open I'm Dreaming," and "A Girl Named Mary and a Boy Named Bill." Martin also plays tribute to his boyhood idol, Bing Crosby, with a version of "Just One More Chance" that does not stray too far from the original. The uptempo numbers were cut at the second session, including "Who's Your Little Who-Zis," "I Feel a Song Comin' On," "I Feel Like a Feather in the Breeze," and "Louise," which Lewis actually sings in the film. Two years after the release of Dean Martin Sings, the record industry had adopted the twelve-inch LP as its primary long-playing medium, and so the album was reissued with the addition of four more songs: a lovely ballad treatment of "When You're Smiling," the number-two hit "That's Amore," and two Italian-flavored songs, "Oh Marie" and "Come Back to Sorrento," the latter sung entirely in Italian.

On paper, a collection of songs about the American South sung by an Italian American from Ohio may sound like an unlikely choice for Martin's second Capitol LP. But that is precisely what Swingin' Down Yonder (1955) is, and it works because the Dixieland idiom perfectly suits Dino's devil-may-care approach to swing. This time no marathon one-day session was needed; Martin's first true concept album took shape over the course of three sessions held between September 1954 and February 1955. Like on the previous record, Dick Stabile is at the helm, but the arrangements are now all bouncy and jazzy, though a little gimmicky at times. The studio band sounds tight and includes fine musicians like trombonist Milt Bernhardt and trumpeters Charlie Teagarden, Conrad Gozzo, and Mannie Klein. Dino is obviously at ease crooning Southern-themed standards such as "Carolina Moon," "When It's Sleepy Time Down South," and "Georgia on My Mind," and he gets the chance to pay homage not only to Crosby ("Mississippi Mud," "Dinah," "Basin Street Blues") but also to Al Jolson ("Carolina in the Morning"). One of the lesser-known tracks on the album is the Gene Krupa-associated "Just a Little Bit South of North Carolina," and this musical journey into a fairly recent past, as revivalist as it clearly sounds, makes it evident that Martin's easy-swinging style would not be out of place on any Mississippi river steamboat.

Martin turned to ballads for his next project, entitled Pretty Baby (1957) and recorded over the course of two sessions held at the end of January 1957. Although the concept is not as evident here as on the previous album, Dino's nonchalant performances are always more enjoyable than the often annoying Pied Pipers-like vocal accompaniment with which the arrangements are saddled. Martin's happy-go-lucky persona is underscored by the cover, which has our man looking knowingly at the camera as he passes by a beautiful blonde who openly smiles at him. A similar motif would reappear two years later on the jacket of A Winter Romance. The charts, provided by Gus Levene on this occasion, make the ballads swing in a comfortable manner, and the studio orchestra, whose size is much more reduced than before, features notable names such as drummer Nick Fatool, pianist Buddy Cole, trombonist Elmer Schneider, and guitarist Alvino Rey. Martin keeps tapping into the Crosby songbook ("Only Forever" and "It's Easy to Remember"), and besides the title track, he turns in some solid performances on songs like "I Can't Give You Anything but Love," "Sleepy Time Gal," "The Object of My Affection," and "Nevertheless (I'm in Love with You."

If Martin seems to be very relaxed on Pretty Baby, he is even more so on Sleep Warm (1959), where relaxation actually becomes the concept. Recorded over three sessions in October 1958, the album boasts appropriately dreamy arrangements by Pete King and has Dino's favorite pal, Frank Sinatra, conducting the orchestra. This was not the first time that Sinatra took up the baton: he had already conducted a series of Alec Wilder tone poems in 1956 and Peggy Lee's LP The Man I Love in 1957. It seems clear that Martin was attempting to create a concept album in the manner of Sinatra's classic Capitol concepts here, since even the title track was specifically written for this project. The rest of the tunes are mostly standards that make reference to the acts of sleeping or dreaming, such as "Hit the Road to Dreamland," "Dream," "All I Do Is Dream of You," and "Dream a Little Dream of Me." Once again, Martin finds room for songs associated with Crosby ("Goodnight Sweetheart," "Let's Put Out the Lights (and Go to Sleep)," and "Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams") as well as quoting the classics ("Brahms' Lullaby") and unearthing the rather obscure gem "Cuddle Up a Little Closer, Lovey Mine." Another woman appears on the cover, but this time she is comfortably sleeping in a bed of clouds and not looking at Dino (and perhaps not wearing any clothes under those nebulous sheets), who would further this concept five years later when he cut the album Dream with Dean for Reprise.

Rather than a full-fledged Christmas package (he would not release one such record until 1966), Martin's next project, A Winter Romance (1959), is a concept album built around the theme of winter, with a couple of Yuletide songs thrown in because in at least half the globe the Christmas holidays happen to take place during the winter. I have already published a more in-depth article about this lovely LP—one of my personal favorites in Martin's discography—in The Vintage Bandstand, so if the reader is interested, the piece may be accessed here. Then, for his first record of the new decade, Martin would have his first opportunity to collaborate with Nelson Riddle, who had been working closely with Sinatra for about seven years. For their first album together, This Time I'm Swingin'! (1960), Riddle and Martin selected a repertoire made up of older and newer songs, to which they gave an irresistible, laid-back swinging treatment, with arrangements that are not very different from the ones Riddle would write for the LP Sinatra's Swingin' Session about one year later. In fact, one of the songs, "I Can't Believe That You're in Love with Me," would also be selected by Sinatra for that album, and "Imagination" had been recorded by Young Blue Eyes back during his tenure with Tommy Dorsey and was a song that he often featured in his live performances. Two songs, "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face" and "On the Street Where You Live" are culled from Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's My Fair Lady, and Dino shines on "You're Nobody 'Til Somebody Loves You," "Mean to Me," and "Just in Time." It seems that by now it had become almost necessary for Martin to tip his hat to Bing Crosby at least once on every record, so here he includes one of Der Bingle's latest hits, "True Love," done as a mid-tempo swinging ballad. The studio orchestra is full of West Coast luminaries (Buddy Collette, Don Fagerquist, Pete Candoli, and Shorty Sherock are just a few examples) and in this kind of company Martin delivers on the title's promise—he is definitely swinging this time!

Just why it took Martin and Capitol so long to think of cutting a whole album of Italian and Italian-influenced songs is anyone's guess. To be fair, three out of the four tunes added to the twelve-inch version of Dean Martin Sings have an Italian origin, so in that respect they foreshadow Dino: Italian Love Songs (1962), which was completed in three sessions held in September 1961. Unlike Sinatra, Martin had always openly celebrated his Italian-American heritage by performing Italian-flavored songs (sometimes even in Italian) and producing a collection of some of his favorite tracks of this kind was a stroke of genius. In fact, Dino: Italian Love Songs, was the only one of his Capitol albums that actually charted, and many of the songs it includes ("Return to Me," "On an Evening in Roma") have become closely associated with Martin, who featured them prominently in nightclub appearances. The arrangements are by Gus Levene, who also conducts the orchestra, and although some of the charts sound grandiloquent at times, they usually complement Dino's laid-back crooning beautifully. Though not all the tunes are genuinely Italian ("I Have But One Heart" is an example of this), they all have an Italian feel, and many of them do indeed hail from Italy. For instance, "Take Me in Your Arms" is "Torna a Surriento" (also included in Dean Martin Sings) with a different set of lyrics, and "There's No Tomorrow" is "O Sole Mio" with the same English lyrics sung by Tony Martin on his RCA recording of this classic Neapolitan song. Other standout tracks from the album are "Just Say I Love Her" and "Arrivederci Roma," and Dino sounds so much at ease warbling these Italian ditties that it is fairly surprising that he never recorded a follow-up to this marvelous LP.

By the time Martin's last project for Capitol, Cha Cha de Amor (1962), was released, the singer had switched labels and signed with the Frank Sinatra-owned Reprise Records, for which he had already cut an album, French Style. Recorded in three sessions in December 1961, Martin's last Capitol LP is one of his strangest: as the title suggests, here we have a set of twelve songs, most of which did not originate in Latin America, set to a cha cha beat. The concept is even more unlikely if we bear in mind that by 1961-62, the brief cha cha craze of a few years earlier had practically waned. But, oddly, the concept works because Nelson Riddle handles the arrangements, which are anything but pretentious and which suit Dino's relaxed delivery much better than one would expect. It is difficult to pick standout tracks on this album, both because all the performances are strong and because, as annotator James Ritz points out in his notes for a 2005 CD reissue, "although [it is] delightful and easy to listen to, there's an inherent sameness about the album that left room for very few surprises." Yet this sameness should be attributed neither to Martin, who always sings with gusto, nor to Riddle, whose arrangements are highly inventive, but perhaps to the repetitive nature of the cha cha rhythm itself. In any case, if pressed to choose favorites, I would name the title song, "Somebody Loves You," "Love (Your Spell Is Everywhere)," "I Wish You Love," and "A Hundred Years from Today." Dino clearly enjoyed the format of this album, for one of his first LPs for Reprise, Dino Latino, would follow a similar Latin American theme. After completing the sessions for Cha Cha de Amor, Martin began to record in earnest for Reprise, entering a highly successful phase in his career that, at least as far as charted hits were concerned, would surpass his Capitol era. But that is, as they say, an entirely different story to be told at a different time.