At the Hollywood Bowl 1943-1948<\/i><\/a> \u2013<\/i>collects rarely-heard radio broadcasts featuring Sinatra singing Christmas songs and expressing (scripted) holiday greetings.<\/p>\nChristmas on the Air<\/i> features 22 tracks, all dating from 1943 to the early \u201850s. The recordings are drawn from CBS station identification spots, and radio shows featuring the vocal icon (The Frank Sinatra Show<\/i> from various years, Light Up Time<\/i>, Your Hit Parade<\/i>, Songs by Sinatra<\/i>, etc.). There are even spots from U.S. Treasury Department broadcasts and an extended commercial for Lucky Strike cigarettes. The audio quality (and\/or the results of Sing\u2019s restoration efforts) make it an enjoyable listening experience.<\/p>\n
And the songs, while familiar, are presented in warmly arranged style; when Sinatra quips aboot the forecast calling for \u201clight snow and lighter music,\u201d he\u2019s right on target. He\u2019s very much in gentle crooner mode on chestnuts like \u201cWhite Christmas,\u201d and even when taking on the playful (well, it was considered<\/i> playful back then) \u201cBaby, It\u2019s Cold Outside,\u201d he still swings sweetly, without a hint of lascivious intent.<\/p>\n
Some of the tracks are live, like \u201cI\u2019ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm\u201d from 1951. For that one, he swings a bit, in the style that would bring him his biggest fame. Sometimes the holiday theme is stretched a bit, as on his duet with Toni Harper, \u201cButton Up Your Overcoat,\u201d but it\u2019s fun enough to more than justify its inclusion.<\/p>\n
The reverent \u201cAve Maria\u201d finds Sinatra singing in Latin, with syrupy yet somehow plucky strings behind him; you can almost feel the fake snow as the choir trills along. \u201cThe Lord\u2019s Prayer\u201d is suitably reverent, too, with Sinatra leaning into the passion of the prayer\u2019s words. To balance all that, there\u2019s a deeply goofy \u201cAll I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth.\u201d It may well be the only recording of him tackling the novelty tune (but then, how many versions would we actually need?).<\/p>\n
The spoken-word bits might render Christmas on the Air<\/i> less than perfect for holiday background music, but there aren\u2019t so many as to intrude too much. And as a time capsule of a much more innocent time \u2013 even with the warm messages to \u201cJoe\u201d who\u2019s overseas fighting fascism because Americans used to be opposed to fascism<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0 \u2013 they\u2019re definitely worth hearing.<\/p>\nThe inescapable fact about holiday albums is that almost nobody spins them any time outside the season (save for reviewers writing on deadline in, say, early November). And Christmas on the Air<\/i> isn\u2019t likely to change that paradigm. But when the season rolls around, this new set of Sinatra definitely deserves to go into rotation.<\/p>\n
Note:<\/b> the vinyl configuration of this set features 15 tracks; the CD has 22.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Frank Sinatra released A Jolly Christmas from Frank Sinatra in 1957, and the LP reached No. 23 on the Billboard 200 chart. But Christmas albums predate the 12\u201d LP format, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30375,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,37,49,51,65],"tags":[860],"class_list":["post-30374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-compilation","category-holiday","category-new-release","category-pop","category-review","tag-frank-sinatra","cat-19-id","cat-37-id","cat-49-id","cat-51-id","cat-65-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30374"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30494,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30374\/revisions\/30494"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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Frank Sinatra released A Jolly Christmas from Frank Sinatra<\/i> in 1957, and the LP reached No. 23 on the Billboard<\/i> 200 chart. But Christmas albums predate the 12\u201d LP format, and Sinatra had ventured into holiday-themed recordings and performance much earlier as well. His third \u201calbum\u201d \u2013 at that point a booklet containing four 78rpm shellac discs \u2013 was released in 1948 as Christmas Songs by Sinatra<\/i>. That set itself was a collection of earlier singles, with \u201cWhite Christmas\u201d dating back to 1944.<\/p>\n