Lesser-Known Bandleaders in Brief: Dick Stabile

Reading the excellent book Popular American Recording Pioneers, by Tim Gracyk and Frank Hoffmann, I recently found an allusion to a series of articles entitled "Famous Bandmasters in Brief," originally published in the magazine Jacobs' Orchestra Monthly in the 1910s. This gave me the idea for a new series of posts for The Vintage Bandstand, which I will call "Lesser-Known Bandleaders in Brief," and which will offer short portraits of bandleaders who either are not as well known today as they were in their heyday, or who were never able to achieve great popularity in the first place. This new series begins with an article devoted to Dick Stabile, an accomplished saxophonist who is best remembered for his work as arranger and musical director for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis but who made some very interesting recordings with his own band that are rather obscure today.

Born in Newark, New Jersey, on May 29, 1909, into a musical family, Dick Stabile was a fine alto saxophonist who had been around for quite a while by the time the Swing Era officially began. He had learned to play the saxophone as a teenager, and his first serious job had been with Ben Bernie's orchestra, but by the mid-1930s, he was already fronting his own band and making records for the Panachord and Decca labels, his band featuring vocalist Gracie Barrie, who would soon become his first wife. In his book The Big Bands, critic George T. Simon describes Stabile as "a handsome, smiling, gentle sort of Lothario" and praises "his amazing technique" (479), although he criticizes his ability to play real jazz, which actually sounds like too severe a judgment in the face of the excellent recordings that the Stabile band made between the 1930s and the 1950s.

During World War II, Stabile joined the Coast Guard, and so his wife led the orchestra until his return to civilian life, when he reorganized the band and resumed touring. A January 1947 Billboard review of an appearance at the Aragon Ballroom in Ocean Park, California, during which Stabile shared the bandstand with the sweet band of Art Kassel, mentions that the outfit is only four weeks old and refers to its style as a "would-be hybrid cross between Boyd Raeburn and Tommy Dorsey" (31), but the tone of the reviewer is rather dismissive and overtly critical of the band's sound. At this point, George Siravo was among the arrangers working for the band, and his arrangements were complex and innovative, perhaps prompting the comparison with Raeburn's progressive approach to swing.

In 1949, while playing at Ciro's, in West Hollywood, Stabile met Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis and soon became their musical director, remaining close friends with both men until the end of his life. Stabile also wrote the charts for Dino's Capitol albums Dean Martin Sings and Swingin' Down Yonder (you can read more about these albums here), as well as accompanying both Martin and Lewis on radio and television even after they broke up their act together (you can see Stabile playing "The Man I Love" on television with Martin and Lewis here). The 1950s were successful years for Stabile, as he was involved with popular Martin hit recordings such as "That's Amore" and "Memories Are Made of This," but throughout the 1960s and '70s he concentrated on leading orchestras at various hotels in California, his last notable job being as leader of the band at the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans, where he passed away on September 18, 1980, following a heart attack.

The only CD compilation of Stabile's work currently available is the very interesting British import Many Faces (Montpellier Records, 2008), which includes material from sessions recorded in 1955 and 1957, with arrangements courtesy of Russ Garcia. Though this is already rather late in Stabile's recording career, the orchestra has not lost any of its vigor, and it sounds crisp, clear, and engaging, powered by Stabile's highly polished saxophone technique. The 24 tracks on the CD justify its title, showing that Stabile was definitely a musician of many faces, tackling ballads and uptempo numbers with equal ease, sometimes indulging in his trademark runs ("Many Faces" is a fine instance of this) but also offering thoughtful solos of great beauty. While it is true that the Stabile band relies heavily on arrangements and leaves little room for improvisation, the jazz content of many of Garcia's charts is undeniable (listen to "Just You, Just Me" or "Tenderly" if you are looking for two examples) and some of the tracks even find Stabile experimenting with Latin rhythms ("Hong Kong Cha Cha") and melodies out of the classical tradition ("Ballet Bleu"). This is the perfect—and, at the time of this writing, alas, the only—place to get a proper introduction to the very exciting and often surprising sound of Dick Stabile, and it is well worth giving it a try.

Dick Stabile on stage with his wife, Gracie Barrie (Photo: William Gottlieb)

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.

Songwriter Spotlight: Pinky Tomlin

A recent post in the blog Jazz Lives brought to my attention the work of the singer and songwriter Pinky Tomlin, one of the lesser-known names in Tin Pan Alley history, in spite of the fact that he wrote songs as popular as "The Object of My Affection." Today's article takes a look at his brief career, discussing some of the few songs he cowrote before quitting songwriting and concentrating his professional activities on the oil business.

"Pinky who?" would probably be the first question that comes to mind when one hears the name of Pinky Tomlin, which is usually not spoken in the same breath with those of Cole Porter, George Gershwin, and Irving Berlin. And yet, Pinky Tomlin collaborated in the creation of one of the most popular songs of the 1930s, "The Object of My Affection," which he recorded himself for Brunswick in 1934 with the Jimmie Grier orchestra, Grier being a cowriter of the tune along with Coy Poe. The recording was so sucessful that the Boswell Sisters, Glen Gray, and Jan Garber did not waste much time in covering it, and over the years it would be cut by artists as different as Bert Ambrose, Dean Martin, and Faron Young. Although he wrote a few other interesting songs, Tomlin was never able to recapture the success of "The Object of My Affection," which stands as his greatest contribution to American popular music.

Born Truman Tomlin in Arkansas in 1907, he grew up mostly in Oklahoma, and according to Don Tyler in his book Hit Songs 1900-1955: American Popular Music of the Pre-Rock Era, he "got the nickname 'Pinky' because of his pale hair and [because] he sunburned easily because of his fair complexion" (482). As a kid, Tomlin learned to play guitar and banjo and was so proficient on the latter that in his teens he got to play with none other than Louis Armstrong in a riverboat band. It was while attending the University of Oklahoma that he wrote "The Object of My Affection," apparently dedicated to his soon-to-be wife Joanne. Tomlin was rather active musically while in college, which led to his being discovered by Jimmie Grier, who at that time held an engagement at the prestigious Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles but was also touring around the country. Grier was so impressed by Tomlin's songwriting that he encouraged him to travel west and record some of his songs with his band. The standout of these sessions was, of course, "The Object of My Affection," featuring a vocal refrain by Pinky himself. In their book Sentimental Journey: Intimate Portraits of America's Great Popular Songs, Marvin Paymer and Don Post accurately describe "Object" as a "happy-go-lucky tune that lends itself well to 'rippling rhythm'" (279), an allusion the staccato style popularized by bandleaders such as Hal Kemp and Shep Fields. The authors go on to analyze the technical reasons that possibly contributed to the widespread popularity of the tune:

Few songs have as many repeated notes as this one, which is also remarkable for its many eighth-note triplets and dotted quarters and eighths. A climax of sorts is reached at the end of the release, with the repeated triplets on the note b-flat at the words: "go where she wants to go, do what she wants to do." (280)

Whatever the strictly musical reasons may be, the truth is the witty yet simple lyrics must also have helped make the song successful because they blend perfectly well with that happy-go-lucky melody: "The object of my affection / Can change my complexion / From white to rosy-red / Oh, any time she holds my hand / And tells me that she's mine." The popularity of the song (of which bawdy versions with unprintable lyrics not written by its author actually exist) opened the doors of Hollywood to Tomlin, who would star in four low-budget musicals that did not really get anywhere, although in some scenes his southern charm shows through in his vocals, even if the songs are nothing special. Here is an example of Tomlin on the big screen, singing "Old-Fashioned Melody" and looking somewhat like Kay Kyser:

Bandleader Jimmie Grier

Tomlin must have felt that his future did not lie in movies, and so he decided to concentrate on songwriting and occasional radio work (most famously with Eddie Cantor on the Texaco Town show) and with the arrival of the Swing Era, he even led his own big band beginning in 1938. Despite the success of the band, not many recorded examples of its work exist, and the pressure caused by constant touring took its toll on Tomlin, who disbanded after merely two years. Some of the songs he wrote during his brief career, such as "What's the Reason (I'm Not Pleasing You?)" and "The Love Bug Will Bite You" (performed here by Fats Waller) are attractive and enjoyable, which makes us wish that he had composed more. Such a wish is expressed by Groucho Marx during a 1958 episode of the television show You Bet Your Life on which Tomlin guested and where he performed a very charming version of "The Object of My Affection." Here is the clip, and if you would like to hear Tomlin sing, you simply have to move the bar to around 5 minutes and 30 seconds:

Bing Crosby and Pinky Tomlin

Yet by this time, Tomlin's years as a singer and songwriter were far behind him, as he had turned to the much more profitable oil business, at which he seems to have been rather successful, even if Groucho jokingly notes that he has moved from one crooked business to another. Until his passing in North Hollywood in 1987 (he survived his wife, Joanne, by about a year), Tomlin does not seem to have composed any further songs, but he did perform occasionally at charity events, and in 1963 he went into the studio to record an album with Nelson Riddle for the small Arvee label, in which he revisits some of his old hits, as well as songs written by others. At the time of this writing, this is the only collection by Tomlin available in a digital format (as a CD-R, as a matter of fact) and a very respectable effort it is. Then in 1981, Tomlin even had time to publish an autobiography—entitled, as one would expect, The Object of My Affection—which is a pleasure to read. The name of Pinky Tomlin is conspicuously absent from most books that discuss Tin Pan Alley and the Great American Songbook, and although he will always be inevitably relegated to the status of a minor figure, he did write a major hit in the 1930s. On the strength of that song alone, even if we overlook the rest of his small output as a songwriter, Tomlin definitely deserves to be better remembered.

The Boswell Sisters were among the first to cover "The Object of My Affection"

Bandstand Christmas Essentials 1: Dean Martin's A Winter Romance

The holiday season is upon us again, and if last year we published an article on the Christmas recordings of Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Dick Haymes, three voices that are essential when it comes to providing melodies for this "most wonderful time of the year," we are now beginning a new series of posts that will hopefully become a Vintage Bandstand tradition. Entitled Bandstand Christmas Essentials, these brief reviews of holiday albums will only be published every month of December. And the first installment spotlights one of my favorite seasonal albums—Dean Martin's A Winter Romance.

Although Dean Martin recorded several Christmas songs throughout his long and successful career (as evidenced by the many anthologies of that type of material currently on the market), as well as a fine full-fledged holiday album for Reprise in 1966, it is his seasonal offering, A Winter Romance, that I would like to spotlight this year. And this is, indeed, a "seasonal" LP in the full sense of the word, for as its very title suggests, this 1959 Capitol gem is a collection of winter-themed tunes that inevitably includes a few Christmas songs, although Martin wisely stays away from traditional carols, which would not have suited the general atmosphere of the disc. Just looking briefly at the cover, it seems rather obvious that it was never anyone's intention to create a Christmas album here. The setting is a mountain ski resort, with lots of snow, a stylish cabin in the background, and people getting ready to go skiing down some slope, and everything has a definite Rockwellian feeling. But on the far left Dino is reluctantly hugging a very willing girlfriend while looking at another woman on the far right who is also suggestively smiling back at him. Not much to indicate Christmas here, unless it is that the character portrayed by Dino hopes to get to be someone's Santa sometime soon...

But as classic Dean Martin as the cover is (it somehow has always reminded me of the one from Pretty Baby, another one of his Capitol outings), we should not get too caught up in it, since the music is the important thing here. The album is bookended by two special-material tunes from the pen of Sammy Cahn and Ken Lane, the one that opens and lends its title to the LP and "It Won't Cool Off," placed as the closing track. The former is the most interesting, a beautiful melody with a lyric that appropriately sets the scene for the rest of the selections but that is somewhat misleading regarding the organization of the album. While "A Winter Romance" introduces the theme of a love story that begins during the winter, the album does not explore such a story, which is just an excuse to string together songs about snow, cold weather, winter wonderlands, and, as already noted, the holiday season.

Dino getting ready for the holidays

In between the two Cahn-Lane compositions, we find some fast-paced tracks about the joys of love during the cold season ("Winter Wonderland," "Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!" and "I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm"), as well as some beautiful ballads like the pensive "The Things We Did Last Summer" (which Frank Sinatra had recorded superbly for Columbia in the 1940s) and the Bing Crosby evergreen "June in January." Two standouts from the album are Dino's lovely mid-tempo reading of "Canadian Sunset" and the often overlooked "Out in the Cold Again," an older song also cut by Johnnie Ray around the same time and handled by Dean with gusto and ease here. "Baby, It's Cold Outside" is undeniably the perfect vehicle for Dino's charming, happy-go-lucky persona, and instead of doing it as a duet with another singer, as is usually the case, he chooses to sing it with a female chorus, which does not work badly either. The two selections most commonly associated with the holiday season are "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," complete with Martin's ad-libbed impersonation of Santa Claus speaking with what sounds like a fake German accent and an enjoyable rendition of "White Christmas" that never strays too far away from Crosby's classic Decca recording. The orchestra and chorus are directed by the lesser-known Gus Levene, and the arrangements are always tasteful and never get in the way of Martin's singing. Finally, the CD reissue adds a bonus track to the twelve on the 1959 LP, "The Christmas Blues," another song written by Cahn but recorded six years earlier which perfectly fits the theme and mood of the album and is most welcome. The original liner notes conclude that "the music, combined with Dean's vocal artistry, succeeds in producing just the kind of lover's glow to stir everyone to humming, dancing, and romancing—whether it's hot or cold outside," and even though Dino recorded more straight-ahead Christmas offerings that are also worth owning, A Winter Romance is an album that never stops spinning on my record player every year come December.

Christmas with Bing, Frank, and Dick: Three Essential Voices for the Holiday Season

Now that the holiday season is approaching and that the cold winter weather is beginning to hit Martin, Tennessee, I have had some time to write some more material for the blog. And so, after a few months, I return with a few reflections on three great singers whose music is a constant presence with my wife and me every year around this time.

So pervasive is the influence of Bing Crosby on the way people worldwide perceive and imagine the holiday season that it seems almost unthinkable that there was ever a time when Bing did not warm up our holidays by crooning Irving Berlin's evocative lyrics about treetops that glisten and children who listen for sleigh bells in the snow. In fact, Crosby's soothing voice singing about a snow-covered white Christmas landscape often makes us forget that in at least half the world, the Christmas season, though perhaps still merry and bright, is not that white or that cold at all! Crosby's warm baritone has become as much a part of the Christmas tradition as Santa Claus, fir trees, and kisses under the mistletoe, and therefore, the title of a two-CD compilation of his complete Yuletide classics recorded for Decca, The Voice of Christmas, hardly sounds like an overstatement. Indeed, it is at Christmas that we are most likely to hear Crosby's voice on the radio, at the shopping mall, and anywhere that Christmas music is played, and more often than not, it will be Bing's timeless version of "White Christmas," an Irving Berlin evergreen that has proven so popular that Jody Rosen has devoted a whole book, White Christmas: The Story of an American Song, to chronicling the inception of such a prodigious hit.

The Voice of Christmas, containing Crosby's entire Christmas songbook on Decca, is certainly the perfect place to begin not only one's acquaintance with Crosby's seasonal recordings but also any Christmas music collection. Starting with Bing's earliest Christmas sides, the original 1935 versions of "Silent Night" and "Adeste Fideles" (the latter featuring Bing singing in Latin), and ending with studio cuts of tunes from the 1954 Bing Crosby-Rosemary Clooney-Danny Kaye musical White Christmas, the set is arranged roughly in chronological order and is a treasury of great Christmas recordings, both traditional and modern, well known and obscure, always brought to life by the familiar voice of Crosby in his prime. Among the lesser-known gems on here are "O Fir Tree Dark," "That Christmas Feeling," "Looks Like a Cold, Cold Winter," "The First Snowfall," and "Is Christmas Only a Tree." All the cuts in the Crosby Christmas canon are also featured, including "I'll Be Home for Christmas," "Jingle Bells" (a classic duet with the Andrews Sisters), "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas," "Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town," "Silver Bells," and of course, "White Christmas," which is presented in four different versions. It must be remembered that Bing was a pioneer when it came to recording Christmas songs in the pop field, and although he sang countless holiday tunes on the radio and on television, and made further Christmas recordings for other labels (Capitol, for instance), his Decca sides represent the finest of his Yuletide output.

Following in Crosby's footsteps, Frank Sinatra made some impressive Christmas recordings for Columbia in the mid-1940s, originally released on the album Christmas Songs by Sinatra at a time when Young Blue Eyes was vying with Der Bingle for the title of the country's most popular singer. Graced by beautiful arrangements from Axel Stordahl, the album spotlights Sinatra's crystal-clear voice on a handful of titles that mix traditional carols ("O Little Town of Bethlehem," "Silent Night, Holy Night") with contemporary songs ("Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town"). Appropriately, the set kicks off with Sinatra's version of "White Christmas," with an arrangement in which Stordahl deliberately steers clear of the original John Scott Trotter chart for Crosby, while Sinatra successfully attempts to adapt the song to his intimate style of the 1940s. Many of the other songs that make up the album had also been recorded by Crosby for Decca, and they underscore both the differences and similarities between both vocalists at this point in time. One of the tracks, Irving Gordon and Lester Lee's wistful "Christmas Dreaming (A Little Early This Year)," stands as one of the highlights of the set, a surprisingly little-recorded gem that certainly deserves more recognition than it has garnered. Columbia reissued Christmas Songs by Sinatra on CD in 1994, with informative liner notes by Roy Hemming and some very interesting extra tracks, including several unreleased alternate takes. Many of these bonus offerings are notable because Sinatra never got around to recording them commercially: that is the case with a medley of "O Little Town of Bethlehem," "Joy to the World," and "White Christmas" taken from a V-Disc; a radio broadcast reading of Franz Schubert's "Ave Maria"; and a jumpy radio version of Johnny Mercer's "Winter Wonderland."

Sinatra would not record another holiday album until 1957, during his successful tenure with Capitol Records, when he released A Jolly Christmas with Frank Sinatra. The arrangements, rather restrained and beautifully simple, are provided by Gordon Jenkins this time, and with yet another mixture of traditional and more modern material, Sinatra tries to update his approach to singing seasonal tunes. As Will Friedwald observes in his study Sinatra! The Song Is You, Frank "sounds much more authoritative and majestic in his maturity" (338); this is, indeed, a much more mature effort than his Columbia Christmas sides, which is particularly evident in tracks such as "White Christmas," "Jingle Bells," and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," which he had already attempted in Christmas Songs by Sinatra. Jenkins's arrangements are sometimes playful, as in the opening track, a bouncy rendition of "Jingle Bells" with the backup choir chanting "I love those J-I-N-G-L-E bells!" or in the Sinatra-penned "Mistletoe and Holly." But the majority of the charts tend to be slower and more introverted, as is the case with Mel Torme's "The Christmas Song," the Crosby classic "I'll Be Home for Christmas," and Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne's "The Christmas Waltz," and it is precisely on these numbers that the more mature Sinatra really shines. Undoubtedly, both albums are highly recommended, inasmuch as they both contain excellent holiday music from two starkly different periods of Sinatra's career.

Just why Dick Haymes never got around to releasing an entire album of Christmas songs, like most of his fellow contemporaries did, remains one of the most astonishing mysteries in the history of classic pop singing. Having replaced Frank Sinatra as the featured boy singer with both the Harry James and Tommy Dorsey orchestras, Haymes struck out on his own in 1943, embarking on a very successful solo career and quickly becoming one of the most popular vocalists of the 1940s. With his rich, deep voice, he distinguished himself as one of the most accomplished ballad singers of the era, yet though he occasionally cut the odd Christmas song, for some unknown reason he and his record producers never saw fit to issue an album wholly made up of seasonal favorites. Fortunately, Haymes did feature his share of Yuletide numbers in his live radio appearances, as well as on radio transcriptions, and in 2002, Ballad Records gathered nineteen of these on a CD entitled Christmas Wishes. This album clearly underscores just how unfortunate it really was that Haymes never offered his many fans a studio album of Christmas songs. The material on Christmas Wishes ranges from well-known traditional and modern carols to more obscure sacred songs and hymns, with Haymes ably accompanied by orchestras conducted by Victor Young, Carmen Dragon, and Gordon Jenkins, as well as by vocal groups like the Travis Johnson Singers, the Ken Darby Singers, and the Modernaires.

Some of the selections, such as "I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm," "All Through the Night," and "Button Up Your Overcoat" (a charming duet with Martha Tilton), hardly qualify as Christmas songs, but they do maintain enough of a winter theme, in the manner of Dean Martin's concept album A Winter Romance, to justify their inclusion in the set. Haymes, like Sinatra, was one of the few vocalists that recorded "Christmas Dreaming" (Harry Connick, Jr., is another one, in more recent times), beautifully performed here with a very subdued arrangement courtesy of Gordon Jenkins. Haymes even attempts a Western-styled Christmas song, the lesser-known "Santa Is Ridin' the Trail," and his deep baritone shines in his excellent rendition of "What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?" That sadly hopeful Frank Loesser classic closes a set that successfully does its part to restore Dick Haymes to the classic pop Christmas canon. It certainly makes for some very enjoyable listening: my wife, Erin, gave it to me as a Christmas present last year, and I have already lost count of the number of times that we have listened to it together!

The Intimate Dean Martin: Dream with Dean (1964)

Dean Martin is so well known for his comedic skills and his vocal and stage gimmicks that we sometimes tend to underestimate him as a vocalist. But fortunately, his extensive recorded legacy includes little gems like Dream with Dean that remind us what a great singer he really was. By 1964, when these sessions took place, Martin was under contract to Frank Sinatra's Reprise label, and he was just a few months away from enacting a definitive comeback as a recording and television star. And, although he did not know it as he entered the studio, this album would play no small part in his return to the top.

After several hit releases throughout the 1950s that saw him accompanied by everything from swinging orchestras to Latin-flavored combos, Martin decided to cut a concept album of slow ballads, sung as slow as they could be sung, with an intimate backing of just four pieces: jazz great Barney Kessel on guitar; Ken Lane, Dean's long-time accompanist, on piano and celeste; Red Mitchell on bass; and Irv Cottler, who appeared on countless Sinatra sessions, on drums. The resulting sound is, of course, sparse and mellow, but it actually works very well behind Martin's voice, which sounds deep and soothing, a little bit as though he were singing directly into the listener's ear, trying his best to contain the emotions expressed in the lyrics.


Together with the dreamy sound of the four-piece outfit, the superb song selection is another one of the reasons why this album is such an artistic success. The program kicks off with a lovely, understated reading of "I'm Confessin' (That I Love You)" that aptly sets the scene for the rest of the romantic confessions that are to follow. Martin tackles standards like "Fools Rush In," "Blue Moon," and "I Don't Know Why (I Just Do)" very convincingly, his voice lulled by the soft strains provided by Kessel's self-contained guitar embellishments and Lane's beautiful piano work. He also chooses lesser-known tunes like "I'll Buy That Dream" and "If You Were the Only Girl" and proves that they can flourish in this musical setting. In "Gimme a Little Kiss Will Ya Huh," he does not exactly whisper like Whispering Jack Smith did in his classic version from the twenties, yet he sounds far more seductive and charming than anyone else I have ever heard croon that quasi-forgotten song. The quartet plays so low in "Smile" that for a second you even forget that Martin is not singing a cappella, and "Hands Across the Table" features what must be one of the most poetic lyrics that Dino ever sang: "Hands across the table / While the lights are low / Though you hush your lips / Your fingertips / Tell me all I want to know."


Halfway through the album, we find "Everybody Loves Somebody," an oldie that would become forever associated with Martin, though not in this evocative version, but in a full orchestral arrangement featuring a vocal choir and leaning clearly toward contemporary sixties pop. The new reading of the song, also recorded in 1964, quickly rose to the top of the charts at a time when the Beatles were usually monopolizing that spot. However, I have always thought that the more commercial hit version is somewhat overproduced and much prefer this earlier, more relaxed approach. The CD reissue of Dream with Dean (Collector's Choice, 2001) appropriately pairs the album with 1964's Everybody Loves Somebody, a number-two entry in the album charts for Dino, which conveniently allows us to have both versions of the song in one disc. But as good as the tracks in the second album are, Dream with Dean is the true jewel here. As Stan Cornyn wrote in the original liner notes, "Dean Martin's performance sounds deceptively simple. Don't be fooled. . . . Dean's finesse is built on a substantial substructure of hard-learned craft." Indeed, no matter what he was doing, Dino always had an uncanny ability for making the difficult come across as simple. It is only too bad that he did not choose to cut more albums like this one.



Videos

I'LL BUY THAT DREAM



EVERYBODY LOVES SOMEBODY



BLUE MOON



SMILE



FOOLS RUSH IN



I'M CONFESSIN' (THAT I LOVE YOU)