Customer Reviews

The Very Best of Frank Sinatra: Original Keys for Singers

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Hal Leonard did the job right when they assembled this book, The Very Best of Frank Sinatra. The collection contains forty of Frank's standards in the keys in which he performed them scored for piano and vocal. Scoring these songs in the keys in which Frank performed them is particularly helpful when using his recordings as a source. The piano accompaniment is also written in such a way as to make arranging easy. Both hands feature characteristics of the original arrangements which help in writing the bass line or in scoring brass and sax riffs. Great book!

The book contains 40 songs as sung on recordings by Sinatra. The piano part is a transcription of the orchestra, which can make a non-jazz player sound pretty good, if they read music well.

This is about as faithful to the recordings as it gets. Woody Mankowski's transcriptions bring the orchestra or band backup under the hand of the pianist and notate the rhythmic pacing of Frank's vocal line wonderfully. The piano parts are not "easy-to-play" as they are so close to what you hear on the recordings, so a more experienced pianist will get more out of this book than a beginner. Sight-reading these arrangements (some more than others) was challenging. There are no guitar tabs, only chord names, so an accompanying guitarist will not find inversions and will have more work to match the recording than the pianist, but the chords can certainly help the pianist recognize chords more quickly. I would have loved to have had Pennies From Heaven included, but I suppose you have to draw the line somewhere! Tremendous quality collection.