Best collection of Sinatra's work with Harry James?

I know there's not much out there, but is there a decent source for all of the Hoboken Four stuff? (Or anything else that might qualify as very early Sinatra?)

 

Is there a release -- LP or CD -- of Ciribiribin that doesn't have the beginning clipped off? (Maybe it's just that way on the master?)

 

Thanks, Bob. I ordered this yesterday.

Do you know if any of the assorted releases of "If I Didn't Care" (the live version on the official Sony releases, July 10, 1939) have a clean start, rather than a fade in?

 

The boxed set has the same fade-in as the Columbia CD.

 

I was on the road for a few hours today, and brought this boxed set along for the ride. I think it's certainly worth picking up if you're a fan of Harry James -- and there's some fine singing, too, and not just from Sinatra.

 

Just found the original 78 on Youtube, and the beginning of the first note is not clipped off like it is on the CD pictured.

 

That's the one, yes. The 78 has the full attack on the first note; the CD is clipped off. I'll post a comparison when I can.

 

"On a Little Street in Singapore" has the first three beats of music missing on the CD vis-a-vis the 78.

 

Re: Ciribiribin

I heard this LITERALLY the first time I played the CD. For whatever reason, it caught my ear. (Not always the case.)

To check it today, I put both the CD and the youtube video of the 78 into Protools. (I checked it on a 78 posted at Archive.org, as well, and it correlates with the Youtube-posted 78.) Because I had to get speed as close as possible, I zoomed in and made a cut at the start of the 2nd beat of the song, made a cut, and zoomed in on a prominent snare drum hit near the end, and made a cut. I then compared lengths of those two segments and got 2:17.671 on the CD vs. 2:17.587 on the 78, so speeds were very close, but regardless, I altered the 78's pitch to match the CD precisely (and I altered the entire 78 file by that appropriate amount).

Once that was done, the beginning of the files looked like this, with blue (top) being the CD and green (bottom) being the 78:

Harry's first note is circled in red on both versions. The distance between the periods (the spikes within the circles) is .004 seconds. If you look toward the left of the circles, you can see that there are "buildup spikes" as the note commences that are cut off on the blue (CD) file, and it's not just "fluff" -- it's the start of the note.

Here it is in more detail:

The space between those little circled blurps is, you guessed it, 0.004 seconds. That's the note's initial emergence from Harry's trumpet, and there is arguably even a little "musical fluff" before that, but those two circled peaks are definitely musical, not just noise, and they are missing on the CD. I'll get audio posted later. Gotta run out for lunch.