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Tracklisting & More Information
Acquired from a life-long Frank Sinatra collector, this very rare item has been stored away for most of its life but is now, some forty odd years later, seeing the light of day.
Following the success of the widely acclaimed Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim collaboration in 1967, Sinatra & Jobim returned to Western Recorders in February, 1969 for three nights to lay down ten more bossa nova styled songs for a second album tentatively titled SinatraJobim.
Here are those ten legendary songs in their full, original, analogue glory, prior to Larry Walsh's mixes for the digital era some 40 years later.
(Song of the) Sabia
Bonita
Drinking Water
One Note Samba
Don't Ever Go Away
Someone To Light Up My Life
Triste
Wave
This Happy Madness
Desafinado (Off Key)
Looking to recreate the magic of the first session, some of Sinatra's less mainstream efforts made after the success of that first Sinatra-Jobim release simply didn't perform well, and anxieties drove the creation of this second hybrid. Jobim's charts were slightly more complex this time around & new arranger Eumir Deodato lent a different touch. On top of this, Sinatra's album sales had slumped & his commercial dynasty was slipping, eventually leading to his retirement in 1971. In short, the ten songs that made up this ill-fated second Sinatra-Jobim effort never actually saw release. The recordings were shelved. The project aborted.
To give more context, the Sinatra-Jobim album was of course finalised right down to the mixing & mastering & even the cover art was chosen. The scheduled photo for the album was a shot of Frank leaning on the back of a Greyhound bus, taken from the same mid-February '69 photo session which produced the artwork for the albums My Way and A Man Alone. The LP reached the acetate stage & a limited number of 8-track tape editions were quickly fixed up & released to market. This recording was never commercially released in any other format.
For what ever reason, a recall was issued by Warner in the form of a memo ordering the destruction of all 3,500 of the 8-track cassettes that had been manufactured for release. Warner sent this memo to all retailers and distributors of the unsold copies, and even the sold ones! There are fewer than FIVE copies of the 8-track release known to still exist, and an auction way back in 2006 achieved a record sum of $4550 for one surviving copy.
Acetates or test pressings for the proposed LP are reportedly so scarce that the owner of one such rarity told Goldmine Magazine in a 1991 article that he wouldn't part with his for less than $5,000 even then. As far as we are aware, no examples of the acetate have ever surfaced at online auction.
Seven tracks from this aborted session eventually made their way onto side one of the Sinatra & Company album in 1971. Three of the Jobim songs which Frank was reportedly unhappy with, "Off Key“, "Song Of The Sabia“, and "Bonita“, remained unreleased. Fans had to wait until 1995 & 'The Complete Reprise Studio Recordings' for all ten songs from the second Sinatra-Jobim session to finally be made available one way or another, & even then these have since slipped out of print.
Condition: -
The disc is clean with no marks visible to the labels & only the very lightest few surface scuffs are evident to show for its age. Played maybe once or twice only to test the sound quality, in terms of condition this is one of the best examples we've ever seen of an acetate, so fragile & prone they are to wear. For such a unique item too, this is really the best that money can buy for a Sinatra collectable.
What you have on offer here is a once in a lifetime opportunity to acquire the only analogue version of the full ten songs from the ill-fated 1969 Sinatra-Jobim session, songs which Sinatra fans have since deemed masterful & just as stunning as their first collaboration. They follow the exact track sequence they were originally intended for in an album that never was, but hindsight says really, really, should have been.
An amazing & historic artifact for just one lucky Sinatra collector!
ACETATE
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