Album Review: Frank Sinatra A Voice on Air: 1935-1955 (2015)

The 2015 Frank Sinatra box set A Voice on Air: 1935-1955.

Frank Sinatra on NBC, 1940's.

Frank Sinatra hosted and appeared on many radio shows throughout the 1940’s and 1950’s. On many of these radio shows he sang songs that he never recorded on any of his singles or albums. In addition, many of the songs on these radio performances featured different arrangements from when Sinatra recorded the songs for Columbia or Capitol. 

The 107 tracks on the 2015 4-CD set A Voice on Air: 1935-1955 feature many rare Sinatra performances from the era when Sinatra was first taking the world by storm. One of the most amazing rarities the set features is Sinatra’s very first performance on radio. On September 8, 1935, NBC’s Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour featured the Hoboken Four singing “S-H-I-N-E.” The Hoboken Four was comprised of James Petrozelli, Pat Principle, Fred Tamburro, and a skinny 19-year-old named Francis Albert Sinatra. You can’t tell from that one performance that you’re listening to a singer who would have such a huge effect on American music, but the Sinatra tone is still recognizable, even then. Side note: during the Rat Pack years, one of Sinatra’s insults for someone without talent was “the original Major Bowes Amateur Hour loser.” 

The bulk of the recordings on A Voice on Air come from the 1940’s, a decade when Sinatra became a household name and the idol of bobbysoxers across the country. The Sinatra of the 1940’s possessed a warm baritone voice that had a strikingly pure tone. The intimacy of Sinatra’s vocal delivery was a key to his appeal—by some magical trick, it felt as though he was singing directly to the listener. And since much of Sinatra’s repertoire was comprised of tender love songs like “I’ll Never Smile Again” or “Close to You,” it’s no wonder teenage girls went nuts for him. (Another 2015 Sinatra release, Frank Sinatra Lost and Found: The Radio Years, which I reviewed here, features 23 more previously unreleased radio performances.) 

Some of the highlights of the four discs include a duet of “Exactly Like You” with Nat “King” Cole, a delightful pairing with hipster king Slim Gaillard on his novelty song “Cement Mixer,” and “You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me” with the always superb Peggy Lee. There’s also a 1947 recording of Sinatra singing “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” with the composer Irving Berlin, which is a very cool historical moment. A Voice on Air also features early recordings of songs that would later become indelibly associated with Sinatra, like a 1944 recording of “The Way You Look Tonight,” cut twenty years before Sinatra’s now definitive 1964 take on that classic song. Some of the highlights for me were found towards the very end of Disc 4, in a series of radio shows from 1953 and 1955 that feature Sinatra backed by a small group. By this time we’ve moved into the era that most people consider “classic Sinatra,” and Sinatra is noticeably looser and more relaxed in his phrasing. Also featured throughout A Voice on Air are tons of cigarette ads, as Old Gold and Lucky Strike cigarettes were two big sponsors of Sinatra’s radio shows. Oh, the good old days! 

I would recommend A Voice on Air to anyone who is a fan of Sinatra’s music of the 1940’s and 1950’s. The sound quality on almost all of the songs is superb, and on the songs where it’s less than superb, the producers can be forgiven because of the rarity of the performances. Two of the producers were Charles L. Granata, author of the excellent Sessions with Sinatra, one of the key books for understanding Frank Sinatra as a recording artist, and the singer and pianist Michael Feinstein, who is one of the great champions of the Great American Songbook, and of music preservation in general. When I was a youngster, Michael Feinstein’s music was one of my first gateways into the world of the Great American Songbook, and for that I am forever grateful.