MUSIC: ANOTHER WAY

In case you were wondering, here's as vivid a definition of saloon songs as you're likely to find: "[They're] the ones the fellows sing in a dimly lighted club at about 2 o'clock in the morning, when everybody's gassed. Numbsville."

The speaker, of course, is Frank Sinatra, introducing Angel Eyes on the forthcoming CD Live in Australia, 1959. The vintage is important: this isn't the coarse, harder-swinging Sinatra of the '60s or the performer of more recent decades who increasingly barked and bit his way through songs. Those Sinatras already have live albums. Here, for the first time on an official release, is Sinatra in front of an audience at close to his mid-'50s prime, the voice still lithe, graceful and burnished--and dubious hits like My Way yet to be written.

Sinatra has always occupied a gray area between jazz and pop. The small group setting here--vibraphonist Red Norvo's quintet plus longtime Sinatra pianist Bill Miller--frees him to the extent that on some numbers his sense of swing and invention approaches Ella Fitzgerald's joyous, ineluctable pulse (and justifies Capitol's releasing this find on its Blue Note jazz subsidiary). With I've Got You Under My Skin, Sinatra even surpasses the vocal on his famous Songs for Swingin' Lovers version, which really belongs to arranger Nelson Riddle. And as wonderful as that studio performance is, it doesn't include an audibly rapturous female audience member or an unalloyed Sinatra quip in response: "Get your hand off that broad!"

--By Bruce Handy