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Frank Sinatra
Reprise
Tony Bennett
Columbia
These discs are like Mom’s vegetable soup, which, whether exquisitely prepared from the finest fresh ingredients or poured from cans and cooked to perdition, inevitably triggers a set of synaptic responses that add up to a sense of being at home. The Reprise package assembles a few stellar Sinatra showings like his drag-time “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” With these, however, you get oddities like a country-tinged duet with Bing Crosby on “Go Tell It on the Mountain” and a trio of numbers on which Frank hauls his offspring, Tina and Junior, into the studio. These tracks tilt the Sinatra disc toward solid-gone fans and those who bear the scars of growing up with him on their parents’ record players. Snowfall, however, is a fine display by Tony Bennett, whose courtly reserve and mellifluous professionalism carried him through lean decades into fame as an MTV fixture. All the standards are here, and the final track, an“I’ll Be Home For Christmas” recorded live on Jon Stewart’s TV program, is a fitting cap to what goes before.