Tony Bennett & Count Basie And His Orchestra - In Person! (1959)

In Person!, part of a series of 1958 collaborations between Tony Bennett and Count Basie, has an unusually convoluted history. Bennett and Basie appeared together at the Latin Casino in Philadelphia in late November of 1958 in a performance that was recorded for commercial release -- but when that tape proved unusable for technical reasons, producer Mitch Miller decided to bring the singer and the band back together in the studio in a pair of sessions a month later to re-create the concert program. For the original LP release, the producers also dubbed on applause, seeking to fake the ambience of an actual live performance, hence the title of the album. But the fake was obvious to all concerned, and when the album was re-released in 1994 as part of Sony Music's Mastersound series of audiophile CDs, the makers went back to the original session tapes and left off the applause. The result is a state-of-the-art reissue of what was also, as near as one can tell, the first of Bennett's albums to get a stereo release. As this was also the first reissue the album had apparently ever received, the tapes were in impeccable condition -- the result is an extraordinary listening experience, even 40-plus years later. The original album, even with the tampering at the time, had a healthy swing to it, courtesy of the Basie band, and with the richness of tone and the close sound available to the makers of the CD, the album works even better. Bennett's sensitively nuanced intonation in the opening of "Pennies from Heaven" is now up close and personal, while the band's beat in the second half of the song is now crisper and more solid than ever. Ralph Sharon, Bennett's usual accompanist, is handling the piano chores (while Basie himself is credited as leader), and his finely articulated playing is also brought out crisply on "Lost in the Stars" and other tracks. It's all worth hearing, and more often than just once -- it was records like this, as reconstituted properly for CD, that constituted the absolute golden end of the pop legacy of the late '50s.