Erich Kunzel - Nice 'N' Easy: Celebrating Sinatra (2000)

Originally issued on CD in 2000 under the title Route 66: That Nelson Riddle Sound, when it reappeared two years later as an SACD, the title, cover, and emphasis had shifted to a tribute to Frank Sinatra. Even Sinatra-phile Will Friedwald's literate liner notes were rewritten to conform to this new priority. In a way, that's an ironic reflection on the way Riddle was treated during his life, just a mere handmaiden to the Colossus of American Song. And frankly -- pardon the pun -- one suspects it was done to boost a more saleable name over the other, for the album clearly was conceived as a Riddle tribute that happens to include some songs he did with Sinatra. Whatever the marketing department shenanigans, the album works because the medium was right and the conductor is sympathetic to the idiom. Riddle wrote many of his classic charts for a big band with strings -- which is precisely what the Cincinnati Pops are here. Kunzel's arrangers take Riddle's arrangements pretty much as he left them; expanding them for full orchestra, assigning the vocal parts to various instrumentalists, and using his long experience with symphonic jazz fusions -- and a few well-placed ringers -- Kunzel gets them to swing. You wait anxiously for the mother of all Riddle masterpieces, "I've Got You Under My Skin," to fall on its face, and yet it comes off really well, with another Sinatra-phile, tenor saxophonist Ken Peplowski, putting his own spin on the tune in place of the Chairman. The title track is another good one, with trombonist Jim Pugh amiably filling the vocal hole. One slight disappointment is "Summer Wind," which lacks the jazzy electronic organ that made that chart such a seductive Riddle attempt to connect with the swinging '60s. Besides Sinatra, the disc also touches upon one of Riddle's charts for Judy Garland, "Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart," and several numbers that he recorded under his own name, including a sprightly "Get Happy" enlivened by Randy Sandke's superb muted trumpet. Few may recall that Riddle had a number one hit on his own, "Lisbon Antigua," that was on jukeboxes all over the land in 1956; that's here, too, sounding like a gleaming facsimile of the original, minus the voices. The sound is staggeringly clear and powerful, as fine for its time as the Riddle/Sinatra records were in theirs. © Richard S. Ginell