Frank Sinatra – In the Wee Small Hours, Part 2

Nelson Riddle's arrangements are the structure that makes the sustained mood possible. The strings enter after the vocal line rather than underneath it, so each phrase Sinatra sings lands in near-silence before the orchestra responds. The effect is that the voice sounds close and unprotected, as if recorded in a small room rather than a studio. The rhythm section is mixed so low that on several tracks it is barely audible, which removes the swing feel that would have made the songs sound like jazz performances rather than something closer to art song.

The tempos are uniform. Every track on Part 2 sits at roughly the same ballad pace, which means the album rises and falls only through dynamics and phrasing, not through rhythm or key changes. "What Is This Thing Called Love?" opens the disc with Riddle's string introduction, and the tempo it establishes is the tempo that carries through to the final track. The decision to avoid modulation or tempo shifts within songs is deliberate: these are not arrangements that build to a climax but ones that sustain a single emotional line from the first bar to the last. The strings swell occasionally but never take over, and there are no instrumental solos to break up the vocal focus.

The weakness is monotony. By the sixth track the listener knows exactly what the next arrangement will sound like, and the lack of contrast makes the individual songs harder to distinguish on first listen. The choice of standards mitigates this to some degree—each song has a different melodic shape and harmonic progression—but the interpretive approach is so consistent that the album can feel like eight variations on the same performance rather than eight separate statements. The uniformity is the concept, but it is also the limitation. An uptempo track or an instrumental interlude would have given the ear a place to rest, and the absence of either makes the second half of the album feel longer than it is.

The album is front-loaded in the sense that the first three tracks are the strongest performances, but there is no arc. "What Is This Thing Called Love?" and "Last Night When We Were Young" set the tone, and the remaining six tracks maintain it without building toward a climax or resolution. The sequencing is careful—each song ends quietly, and the next begins in the same mood—but the result is that the album feels like a single forty-minute piece rather than a collection of discrete tracks.

"I'll Be Around" and "Ill Wind" sit in the middle of the disc and are the least memorable performances, not because the singing is weaker but because the arrangements offer nothing to distinguish them from the tracks on either side. By the time the album reaches "Dancing on the Ceiling" and "I'll Never Be the Same," the listener has heard seven ballads in the same key and tempo, and even strong phrasing cannot fully compensate for the lack of variety. The final track, "This Love of Mine," ends the album on the same note it began, which is thematically appropriate but leaves no sense of resolution. The album simply stops rather than concludes.

In the Wee Small Hours, Part 2 is the more difficult half of the album, and the one that makes the strongest case for Sinatra as an interpreter rather than a stylist. The singing is as good as anything he recorded in the 1950s, and the arrangements are engineered to foreground the voice at the expense of everything else. The album works best as a late-night listen when the mood matches the material, and it rewards attention to phrasing and breath control in a way that few vocal jazz albums do. The problem is that it offers no relief, and listeners who are not in the exact frame of mind the album assumes will find it slow and samey.

This is not the album to start with if you are new to Sinatra's ballad work. The first disc of In the Wee Small Hours includes faster tracks and more varied arrangements, and it makes a better introduction to the concept. Part 2 is for listeners who already know they want forty minutes of slow, orchestrated heartbreak and are willing to meet the album on its terms. The best tracks are "What Is This Thing Called Love?," "Last Night When We Were Young," and "This Love of Mine," all of which highlight the phrasing and control that make the album worth hearing. If you want to hear where Sinatra's ballad style leads when taken to its furthest point, this is the album. If you want variety or momentum, skip it and listen to the full LP instead, where the sequencing spreads the slow material across two discs and gives the ear more room to breathe.