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Frank Sinatra and Ernie Freeman

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As I recall growing up in Manhattan in the mid-1960s, the Beatles were only big in bedrooms. Kids listened to Fab Four 45s on their portable phonographs sitting on the floor next to their beds or heard the group on AM radios under their pillows. Outside the bedroom, in the world I encountered—the living rooms of friends' apartments, barber shops and distant open windows—what I heard most was Frank Sinatra. Albums were still an adult purchase, and even in the '60s, parents identified with Sinatra the way parents today go nuts at the mention of the Rolling Stones. He was the sound of their youth.

During these years, when adults' taste in music still dominated in my neighborhood, the Sinatra recordings that remind me most of that period were arranged by Ernie Freeman. No other arranger then was better at giving swing a pop-rock feel. And no one else could make Sinatra sound contemporary and cool without pulling him from his idiom. Freeman, of course, arranged Sinatra's hit single, Strangers in the Night, and the album That's Life, both released in 1966.

But for me, my favorite Freeman is what I call “pizza parlor Sinatra"—because when I was little, whenever my father would take us to Luigina's Pizzeria on 181st Street, Freeman-arranged Sinatra songs were bound to come on. What I've always loved about Freeman is that he thought big. Many of his arrangements employed a big meaty drum part played in strip time, a chorus behind Sinatra, and strings and brass. I still can't figure out how he got all of that music into one song without crowding Sinatra or making him sound silly. The songs were fresh, alive, dramatic and hip.

Here are 10 Freeman-arranged Sinatra songs that take me back to the old neighborhood—when coal-kissed pizza pies arrived with mozzarella cheese swimming in fresh red sauce, dads ordered Schlitz beer, moms ordered whiskey sours and kids still lived in a world their parents owned:

Here's Tell Her (You Love Her Each Day)...



Here's When Somebody Loves You...



Here's Somewhere in Your Heart...



Here's Don't Sleep in the Subway...



Here's The World We Knew (Over and Over)...



Here's Then Suddenly Love...



Here's Strangers in the Night...



Here's Give Her Love...



Here's I Will Wait for You...



And here's That's Life...

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This story appears courtesy of JazzWax by Marc Myers.
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