Rating: Three stars
American singer and actor Robert Davi – Die Hard, Licence to Kill etc. – has been a long term fan since he appeared with his idol Frank Sinatra in the 1977 television drama Contract on Cherry Street. This collection of twelve of Sinatra’s best known songs, features similar arrangements by Nic Tenbroek to those iconic ones by the gifted Nelson Riddle, complete with copies of Riddle’s string sections. Nevertheless these re-interpretations can only be a runner-up to the inspired originals. This is true of copies of all 20thcentury greats – Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald etc. – because improvement in a straight-out copy is not an option; their inimitable original works are the reason for these artists’ enduring fame.
Davi, who’s booked to appear at the Melbourne International Jazz Festival on June 7th, and Adelaide Cabaret Festival June 8, does a competent vocal job, copying Sinatra’s phrasing and style, but the maestro’s legendary depth of emotional feeling and belief in the lyric is not equalled here. Comparisons are inevitable and Davi’s voice is pleasant enough, occasionally sounding similar to Sinatra’s unique tonality in the ballads All The Way and In The Wee Small Hours of The Morning or swinging through Day in Day Out and I’ve Got The World On a String. Hearing these, and other Sinatra classics from the fifties and sixties, such as Too Marvellous for Words or Witchcraft, will be a nostalgia trip for many, and may cause some to seek out the originals for comparison. Perhaps though for all copyists there’s advice in the lyrics from one of these songs, Nice n’ Easy: “The problem now of course is/ to simply hold your horses/ To rush would be a crime. . .”
