Frank Sinatra
★★★★
At The Hollywood Bowl 1943-1948
SING. CD/LP
The first in a deep dive into young Ol’ Blue Eyes’ live archives.
The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s summer season of 1943 is notable for including a date by Sinatra, the first pop singer to perform with the orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl. He’d return there on two more occasions that decade – an Oscars concert (1945) and a benefit for service personnel (1948) – with all three broadcast on radio and sourceable as lo-fi bootlegs ever since. Here, cleaned up significantly, are those nights (17 songs on CD, six less on LP), with the singer brilliant though still a kid to many. All Or Nothing At All (1943) would make a stone heart melt; Ol’ Man River (1945) is horrifically racist yet masterful; and hearing the audience participation during She’s Funny That Way (1943) is like watching the olde worlde being torn apart. “Remember your elders,” the heartthrob jokes. “They’re sitting all around you.”