The Complete Reprise Studio Recordings

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ReleasedNovember 21, 1995
RecordedDecember 19, 1960 – June 6, 1988
Length1436:49
The Complete Reprise Studio Recordings
Box set by
ReleasedNovember 21, 1995
RecordedDecember 19, 1960 – June 6, 1988
Genre
Length1436:49
LabelReprise
Frank Sinatra chronology
Sinatra 80th: All the Best
(1995)
The Complete Reprise Studio Recordings
(1995)
Everything Happens to Me
(1996)

The Complete Reprise Studio Recordings is a 1995 box set album by the American singer Frank Sinatra. The release coincided with Sinatra's 80th birthday celebration.[1]

The original 1995 packaging had the 20 discs encased in a small, leather-bound trunk.[2] When it was re-released in 1998, it was repackaged in a more-standard (and cheaper) cardboard format.

As the title implies, the set claims to contain every song ever recorded in the studio during Sinatra's career with Reprise Records, but misses the 49-second "I'm Getting Sentimental Over You" (Reprise) included as the closing track from the 1961 album I Remember Tommy and also leaves off a remake of "Body and Soul" and "Leave It All To Me" (a song written by Paul Anka), in addition to several alternate versions of songs included in the set. The set is the largest ever released for Sinatra to-date, containing 452 tracks on twenty compact discs. The albums represented are:

  1. Ring-a-Ding-Ding!
  2. Swing Along With Me
  3. I Remember Tommy
  4. Sinatra and Strings
  5. Sinatra and Swingin' Brass
  6. Sinatra Sings Great Songs from Great Britain
  7. All Alone
  8. Sinatra-Basie: An Historic Musical First (with Count Basie)
  9. The Concert Sinatra
  10. Sinatra's Sinatra
  11. Finian's Rainbow
  12. Guys and Dolls (with Bing Crosby and Dean Martin)
  13. Kiss Me, Kate (with Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin and Keely Smith)
  14. South Pacific (with Rosemary Clooney and Keely Smith)
  15. Sinatra Sings Days of Wine and Roses, Moon River, and Other Academy Award Winners
  16. America, I Hear You Singing
  17. Robin and the 7 Hoods (with Bing Crosby, Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin)
  18. It Might as Well Be Swing (with Count Basie)
  19. 12 Songs of Christmas (Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Fred Waring album)
  20. Softly, as I Leave You
  21. Sinatra '65: The Singer Today
  22. September of My Years
  23. My Kind of Broadway
  24. A Man and His Music
  25. Moonlight Sinatra
  26. Strangers in the Night
  27. That's Life
  28. Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim (with Antonio Carlos Jobim)
  29. The World We Knew
  30. Movin' with Nancy
  31. Francis A. & Edward K. (with Duke Ellington)
  32. The Sinatra Family Wish You a Merry Christmas
  33. Cycles
  34. My Way
  35. A Man Alone
  36. Watertown
  37. Sinatra & Company
  38. Ol' Blue Eyes Is Back
  39. Some Nice Things I've Missed
  40. I Sing the Songs
  41. Portrait of Sinatra – Forty Songs from the Life of a Man
  42. Trilogy: Past Present Future
  43. She Shot Me Down
  44. L.A. Is My Lady

The set also contained tracks that were never released prior, as well as songs new to compact disc, including those originally recorded for the album America, I Hear You Singing.

They are generally presented in order of when they were recorded, although there are exceptions to that rule, including the concept albums September of My Years and the "Future" section of the triple album Trilogy: Past Present Future. Also, the song cycle Watertown (a story told with its songs) is presented out of order.[2]

Critical reception

Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
AllMusicStarStarStarStarHalf star[2]
MusicHound JazzStarStarStarStar[3]

Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times wrote that this box set allows us to hear Sinatra "at his most relaxed (joyfully redoing signature songs from his Capitol and Columbia years), at his most adventurous (reaching out to new material and new arrangers) and at his most futile (trying, usually in vain, to connect with contemporary pop-rock songs)."[4] Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times: "What one finds on this chronology is America's greatest popular singer audaciously continuing to expand the psychological boundaries of pop vocal expression." Holden remarked that "dozens of songs that [Sinatra] had popularized in the 1940's" were re-recorded by the older Sinatra in versions compiled in this box set, which "have the feel of bittersweet interior dialogues between the singer's older and younger selves."[1]

Track listing

Contributing performers, arrangers and producers

References

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