In early 1956,
Bing Crosby ended the two long-term company affiliations that had defined his career for more than 20 years, leaving his exclusive associations with Paramount Pictures and Decca Records. Thereafter, he made movies and records on a freelance basis. The immediate results were more felicitous for his film work than his recording, as he went to MGM for the successful movie High Society. As a recording artist, in rapid succession he cut the movie soundtrack for Capitol (January-February); a new album for Decca,
Songs I Wish I Had Sung (The First Time Around) (April); and a new album for Verve,
Bing Sings Whilst Bregman Swings (June). The third was the least likely. Twenty-five-year-old
Buddy Bregman, a friend of
Crosby's son Gary, had recently been appointed an A&R executive at the fledgling Verve. His idea for
Crosby was to copy the formula of recent
Nelson Riddle-arranged
Frank Sinatra successes such as
Songs for Swingin' Lovers -- take a collection of inter-war standards and give them punchy big-band arrangements. The approach was well-suited to the aggressive
Sinatra, who wasn't shy about editing the arrangements himself, but singularly inappropriate to the affable
Crosby, who left everything to his arranger/conductor. The 12 songs, none of which
Crosby had released commercially before, were great standards from the likes of
Kern, Rodgers and Hart,
Berlin, and
Gershwin, and
Crosby turned in typically witty interpretations. But
Bregman's repetitive, overly busy arrangements, full of loud, sudden horn blats and splats, forced the singer to compete for attention and occasionally smothered him completely.
Crosby was looking for a way back to commercial appeal with this experiment. But the three albums were all released within a period of weeks in August and September, and only the film soundtrack got a fair hearing and became a hit. ~ William Ruhlmann