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When Capitol vice-president Alan Livingstone announced to their annual convention that he’d signed the down-and-out Sinatra (who had debt, depression and no career prospects), there was an audible groan. Livingstone: ‘My answer to them was, Look, I only know talent, and Frank is the best singer in the world.’ Though humble and grateful, Frank was having a hard time relinquishing his partnership with his ’40s arranger Axel Stordahl. Livingstone was determined to put him together with burgeoning talent Nelson Riddle: ‘Nelson knew how to back up singers and make them sound great.’ Getting to know each other over a few sides, Sinatra was impressed with Riddle’s 1953 treatment of World On A String, but upon hearing his polytonal ballad arranging told pianist Bill Miller, ‘Whew, we gotta be careful with him.’ Miller replied, ‘Hey, Frank, it’s different, it’s working.’
By mid-’55 Sinatra was back on top (thanks to the movie From Here To Eternity and a series of confident albums) and Nelson was forging his distinctive heartbeat tempo, swing-band-plus-strings style that fitted the new Sinatra like a made-to-measure tux. Recasting the repertoire of a previous generation in exhilarating new light and creating new standard songs in the process, Songs For Swingin’ Lovers was the epitome of the rejuvenated, finger-poppin’ Sinatra. Full of lyrical playfulness (‘Stars fractured ’bama last night’) and exuberant re-phrasing (his second chorus of It Happened In Monterey), this music had a vitality and sexiness that made women want to bed him and men want to be him, nowhere more so than in the legend that is the Riddle/Sinatra take on Cole Porter’s I’ve Got You Under My Skin. A brooding, sensuous groove that builds into an explosive, sputtering trombone solo (played by Milt Bernhart over the wrong chords, balancing on a box to get closer to the mike) and pushes on with a hearty ardour before the detumescent coda, it’s one of the most thrilling three and a half minutes in popular music.
While Riddle recognised it as a ‘cornerstone recording for both him and me’, Neal Hefti, the great Basie arranger, said ‘no one has come close to what Nelson achieved with Sinatra … God! That enthusiasm just keeps going on and on and on!’
Johnny Burnette And The Rock’n’Roll Trio
Johnny Burnette And The Rock’n’Roll Trio
Neglected classic from the birth of rock’n’roll.
Record label: Coral
Produced: Owen Bradley
Recorded: Quonset Studio, 16th Avenue South, Nashville; July 2–5, 1956
Released: Autumn 1956
Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)
Personnel: Johnny Burnette (v, g); Paul Burlison (g); Dorsey Burnette (b); Buddy Harman Jr (d); Owen Bradley (p); Anita Kerr Singers (bv)
Track listing: Honey Hush; Lonesome Train (On A Lonesome Track) (S); Sweet Love On My Mind; Rock Billy Boogie; Lonesome Tears In My Eyes; All By Myself; The Train Kept A-Rollin’ (S); Just Found Out; Your Baby Blue Eyes; Chains Of Love; I Love You So; Drinking Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee, Drinking Wine
Running time: 26.27
Current CD: BGO CD177 adds Tear It Up album: Tear It Up; You’re Undecided; Oh Baby Babe; Eager Beaver Baby; Touch Me; Midnight Train; If You Want It Enough; Blues Stay Away From Me; Shattered Dreams; My Love, You’re a Stranger; Rock Therapy; Please Don’t Leave Me
Further listening: Train Kept A-Rollin’ (1997)
Further reading: www.burnette-rock.com
Download: Not currently legally available
Brothers Johnny and Dorsey Burnette and guitarist Paul Burlison had been cutting up the Memphis area for a good five years before they entered Owen Bradley’s famed Nashville studio in July 1956. A few months previously, former schoolmate and work colleague Elvis Presley had hit Number 1 in both the album and singles charts. The Trio were choking on his exhaust. Over the next few days, however, they laid down a series of tracks that hold their own with a lot of The King’s best.
The Trio had signed to Coral on the strength of a string of wins on The Ted Mack Amateur Show in New York. ‘One of the reasons we signed with Coral instead of Capitol,’ Burlison remembers, ‘was that they gave us a free hand on the material we wanted to record.’ Burlison brought a Tiny Bradshaw track, Train Kept A-Rollin’, to the band’s attention; but more importantly he told Bradley about an accident he’d recently had with his Fender Deluxe amplifier. ‘I dropped it between the band-room and stage one evening. That night I got this weird, fuzzed-up sound from it. After the gig I took the back off and found I’d knocked a tube loose.’ Bradley was wise enough to employ this primitive, ear-grabbing tone on both Train Kept A-Rollin’ and Honey Hush, while Johnny B. let rip over the top with a backwoods, rockabilly shout that made Presley sound positively tame.
‘I played a 1952 Esquire with a treble sound that could kill crabgrass,’ recalls Burlison, ‘but I listened to and played everything. In fact, Latin music is one of my favourites.’ And there, on the self-penned Lonesome Tears In My Eyes, you hear his Hispanic stylings, while Johnny exercises the melodic control that would later serve him as a teen idol – garnering hits with Dreamin’ and You’re Sixteen. Unfortunately, fraternal rows and a lack of will on the record label’s part meant that this 10-incher never got off the ground, and the group would founder only a year later. Nevertheless, Burlison is still revered as a sonic pioneer by players as important as Clapton, Mick Green and Jeff Beck; and many of the riotous numbers included here (Lonesome Train, All By Myself) are staples to this day for any self-respecting roots rock’n’rollers.
Sonny Rollins
Saxophone Colossus
Saxophonist comes of age …
Record label: Prestige
Produced: Bob Weinstock and Rudy Van Gelder
Recorded: Van Gelder’s Recording Studio, Hackensack, New Jersey; June 22, 1956
Released: Autumn 1956
Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)
Personnel: Sonny Rollins (ts); Tommy Flanagan (p); Doug Watkins (b); Max Roach (d)
Track listing: You Don’t Know What Love Is; St Thomas; Strode Road; Moritat; Blue 7
Running time: 39.31
Current CD: Concord 1881052
Further listening: Way Out West (1957); Live At The Village Vanguard (1959)
Further reading: Sonny Rollins: The Cutting Edge (Richard Palmer, 1998); Open Sky (Eric Nisenson, 2000); www.sonnyrollins.com
Download: iTunes
Sonny Rollins vied with John Coltrane for the title of top tenor saxophonist of his generation, including one meeting on record (released as the title track of Rollins’ Tenor Madness) only a month before this classic session was recorded. The two were highly individual stylists, and both are widely regarded as the ultimate exemplars of their instrument in jazz.
‘I wasn’t like the guy who started out, played for years and years, found a style, and then somebody heard him and got him a record date and everybody liked him,’ he insisted. ‘That’s not my story. My story is that from the time I was a teenager, I was on records with great musicians.’
In common with most of his peers on that scene, he began using heroin in 1948, and was jailed for a time in 1950 and again in 1952. He eventually kicked the habit in 1955, and resumed his career at a new level.