Sunday Morning Vinyl

Record: Francis A. & Edward K.
Artist: Frank Sinatra and Duke Ellington
Released: Reprise Records, 1968

The first thing I noticed about this record when I pulled it out is that it's almost pristine. It was released in 1968, so it's likely one of the last records my father ever bought and was maybe played only a handful of times. The corners of the album jacket are crisp, the vinyl hasn't a single scratch. [Editor's note: I just found on the last track of Side 2.]

Before I even set the record on the turntable, I checked out the liner notes on the back of the jacket. I've written about this before, but it bears repeating. Writing about records is a genre in and of itself, and if there were an anthology of these thousand-word essays bound in book form, it would be in my Amazon shopping cart right now. 

What exactly are we doing when we write about music? How do we describe a soaring a trumpet solo or the power of a bass line? Can words do justice to the genius of John Coltrane or Miles Davis or Billie Holiday? Sometimes the authors will try, filling the jacket cover with detailed descriptions of the music inside, writing with technical precision that matches the musicians' skills. They understand that their readers are not casual fans, so they write to that level. In reading notes like these I've learned about how albums have been recorded and how bands have gotten together, but more importantly I've learned the language of music. 

The notes that I prefer, however, are ones like Stan Cornyn wrote for this record. Rather than digging into the music, he focuses instead of the musicians, two legends in their own time, Frank Sinatra and Duke Ellington. With a style that could've been borrowed from Mickey Spillane, Cornyn describes the recording studio in intimate detail as his two main characters enter and prepare to record.

"For the next five minutes, with the thoughtful ceremony of a Sumo wrestler, Ellington arranges his cafeteria of sine qua non's. Across the music stand of his Steinway he lays out his cafeteria: One six pack of Cokes. One pkg. Pall Malls. A Kleenex box. A cafeteria spoon. A one lb. box of C&H cube sugar. One Hilton Hotel's bottle opener (no church key at such a session). Six inches from the left piano leg, a plaid two-gallon ice cooler. Ash tray, aluminum. Quantas Airlines flight bag, towel in. Now he is ready."

It could be the opening paragraph of a mystery novel, but with two suspects like Ellington and Sinatra, the case solves itself. There is no mystery. Ellington settles in at his piano as he leads his usual band, but they generally take a back seat to Sinatra, who does what Sinatra does.

Cornyn catches the moment at the end of the recording session when the two of them reflect on their work. "Elegant record, Francis," says Duke. "Always glad to hear about that kind of carrying on," replies Frank.

Always glad.

Side 1
Follow Me
Sunny
All I Need Is the Girl
Indian Summer

Side 2
I Like the Sunrise
Yellow Days
Poor Butterfly
Come Back to Me

Record: Nice 'n' Easy
Artist: Frank Sinatra
Released: Capitol Records, 1960

I was only a few weeks into this project when I began thinking about upgrading to a new turntable. The record player I've been using only occasionally for the past fifteen years is one of the nostalgia driven models you typically see in your local big box retailer. It looks like a small suitcase, complete with a suitcase handle so you can carry it from room to room. It's fine for spinning a record a few times a year, but as I've begun to listen more regularly, I've realized the limitations, specifically of the built-in speakers.

And so I've been researching for the past month or so, trying to find a turntable that would fit my needs. First and foremost, since I don't have a full stereo system anymore, I needed a turntable with Bluetooth capabilities so that I could listen with either my wireless speakers or my headphones, but I didn't want it to be ridiculously expensive. (As you can imagine, you can spend whatever you want to spend, well into the thousands of dollars.)

After reading a dozen or so "best Bluetooth turntable" articles and several detailed reviews of a few different models, I settled on one from Audio-Technica, then spent another couple weeks wondering about it. Did I really need it? Would I really notice a difference? And then last week we were out shopping in Santa Monica, and we wandered into Urban Outfitters, a store that caters to fashion-conscious hipsters.

When we walked out and headed to dinner, I casually mentioned to my daughter that Urban Outfitters had had the turntable I was thinking about buying.

"Is it the Audio-Technica?"

As she explained, all the cool kids (TikTokkers) were buying Audio-Technica turntables. When vintage vinyl started becoming popular again, mainstream artists -- Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, and all the rest -- began releasing new albums (and their back catalog) on vinyl. In 2021 there were actually more records sold in the United States than CDs, the first time in thirty years that vinyl outsold plastic, and it was a trend driven not by nostalgic baby boomers but by precocious kids who wanted to be able to hold their music.

"I just think it's cool that music can be permanent, that it can be yours," said my daughter. As someone once said -- on vinyl -- the kids are alright. And so when those social media influencers outgrew their entry level record players, they turned to Audio-Technica, just like I did. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but there it is.

My new turntable arrived this week, which meant that I had a serious decision to make. I still remember the first disc I played in my car stereo, a Sony pullout that I absolutely adored. It wasn't accidental. I chose Ghost in the Machine by the Police because it was the first CD I had ever bought and they were one of my favorite bands. It felt right.

So the first spin here had to have some significance. I thought about thumbing through the entire collection and finding a record that felt significant, something that would match the significance of the occasion, but since the order of the journey thus far has been left to chance, I decided to see which record was on deck -- and it was the right choice.

I think there are at least twenty Frank Sinatra records in my father's collection, and I've always known that he held Sinatra in the highest regard, filing him in the classical section as an indication of the timeless nature of his vocal talent. Sinatra is also my mother's favorite, so it all made perfect sense.

If I'm being honest, I have to say that this particular record isn't my favorite of his. As the title suggests, it feels like soothing background music. There's nothing dynamic here unless you count Sinatra's legendary voice. He's backed by an orchestra, not a big band, and both Sinatra and conductor Nelson Riddle are comfortable with the situation. Neither pushes the other, and maybe that's okay.

It's obvious, however, that my father did love this album. The slip case is worn, and masking tape holds it together on the top and the bottom, making it clear that the record was in heavy rotation. Even better than that, the record is worn. The hissing, popping, and crackling that people get so romantic about when remembering the favorite records of their youth? It's all here. The first sixty seconds of the opening track are slightly obscured by static so strong that Sinatra's voice fades in and out a bit. And for the first time, an actual skip! I called my daughter into the room to listen as the closing verse of "Dream" repeated itself over and over. "When the day is through... is through... is through..." When I told her that it would keep going like this forever if I didn't lift the needle over the skip, she looked at me blankly as if I were speaking a foreign language. In a way, I was. An archaic language from the distant past.

But she was right when she talked earlier about the lure of physical music. There's a note from Capitol Records on the back of the album cover: "This monophonic microgroove recording is playable on monophonic and stereo phonographs. It cannot become obsolete. It will continue to be a source of outstanding sound reproduction, providing the finest monophonic performance from any phonograph."

It really is quite amazing. I'm sure all of that seemed true back in 1960 when my father bought this record, but who would have believed it in the 1970s when 8-track tapes burst on the scene? What about when cassette tapes dominated the '80s? When I complained to an employee at Wherehouse Records in 1986 or '87 that the CD section was getting bigger as the LP section was shrinking, he told me that soon the records would be gone.

"But what if I don't even have a CD player?" I asked.

"Well, you better get one."

They told us that CDs would be forever. They were the perfect format for storing music because they would never degrade, but they only seemed perfect because none of us could imagine a time when every song ever recorded could be ours in an instant, just with the tap of a button on phones we'd carry in our pockets.

But the folks at Capitol Records were right about this record after all. "It cannot become obsolete." Even though records disappeared and became hopelessly archaic decades ago, they've survived, and they still sound beautiful.

Side 1
Nice 'n' Easy
That Old Feeling
How Deep Is the Ocean
I've Got a Crush on You
You Go to My Head
Fools Rush In

Side 2
Nevertheless
She's Funny That Way
Try a Little Tenderness
Embraceable You
Mam'selle
Dream

Record: Sinatra-Basie
Artist: Frank Sinatra and Count Basie
Released: Reprise Records, 1962

I bought my first true stereo in the summer of 1990, and few purchases before or since have given me as much pleasure. Until then my music had come from single-speaker clock radios, cassette tapes played through a boom box, or the CD players of college roommates. 

But when I gladly parted with six hundred dollars of my summer earnings and came home from Rogers Sound Labs with a receiver, a five-disc CD changer, and a set of speakers, everything changed. Suddenly I needed to have every song I'd ever loved in my CD collection, and even some that I didn't love just because someone else might want to hear it.

If only my twenty-year-old self had known about the world of streaming that was just a few decades away. Today I can stand in my kitchen and ask Alexa to play any song ever recorded, and within seconds I can be singing along while dicing an onion. It's a brave new wonderful world, but one thing we've lost is the joy of the search and the thrill of discovery.

During that first summer I had a detailed list of CDs that I wanted (needed) to add to my collection. Most weekends I'd spend a few hours with a likeminded friend scouring the racks at a used record store, searching for nuggets hidden in the stacks. The CDs were organized alphabetically, but only loosely, so the only method was to flip through -- flip through them all.

That rhythm of the cases clicking together as my index and middle fingers walked up the stack was hypnotic, and I don't have to look too deeply into my memories to hear the sound of the plastic click, click, click, clicking. And then you'd find one. Sometimes it was a CD you'd been searching for for weeks, but sometimes it was even better -- a CD you didn't even know existed. A bootleg recording of a live concert or the European edition of a CD you already owned. (You'd buy it anyway because it might have different artwork and an extra track.) I miss the search. I miss the discovery.

It wasn't immediately that I connected my love of music with my father's, nor my growing CD collection to his vinyl, but that would come. When I wanted to expand my jazz collection, I looked to my father for guidance and opened his record chests with intent. It was similar to my Saturday CD runs. Some of the names were familiar, but others were brand new. I flipped through the records, pulling one album out at a time, and I added titles to my list.

This record, Sinatra-Basie, was one of the first to show up in my collection, and it's still one of my favorites. I don't remember for sure, but I'm guessing I was drawn to it because of Frank Sinatra, who was one of my mother's favorites, probably her only favorite. 

My whole life was in front of me when I was in my early twenties and first listening to this record, and no track spoke to that like the fourth song on the first side.

"Lookin' at the world through rose-colored glasses
Everything is rosy now
Lookin' at the world and everything that passes
Seems a rosy hue somehow..."

If my life had been a movie, I imagined, this was the song playing in the opening credits. A few scenes later, when life took its first turn, there would be Sinatra again with a track from side two, "Learnin' the Blues," this time gently explaining the pain of lost love. He gently croons,

"When you're at home alone, the blues will taunt you constantly.
When you're out in a crowd, those blues will haunt your memory."

People often refer to one album or another as being the soundtrack of their lives, and I think that's telling. Music speaks to us, and great music speaks to all of us. What Sinatra and Basie have done here is combine Basie's orchestra with Sinatra's singing, and the result is a record the must've spoken to by father sixty years ago, certainly spoke to me thirty years ago, and still swings today. That's genius.

Side 1
Pennies from Heaven
Please Be Kind
(Love Is) The Tender Trap
Looking at the World thru Rose Colored Glasses
My Kind of Girl

Side 2
I Only Have Eyes for You
Nice Work If You Can Get It
Learnin' the Blues
I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter
I Won't Dance