Martin’s Reprise Songs Finally Join CD Pack

*** DEAN MARTIN

“Greatest Hits”

EMI-Capitol

If all the Rat Pack celebration of recent weeks has sent you to the record store in search of those disarming Dean Martin hits from the ‘60s on Reprise Records, you must have shaken your head in disbelief.

In a pop world where everything with even the slightest commercial potential has been reissued on CD, none of Martin’s Reprise recordings--including such Top 10 hits as “Everybody Loves Somebody” and “I Will”--has been made available.

That changed this week with the release by EMI-Capitol of this 16-song package, which is divided equally between recordings from the ‘50s on Capitol and the ‘60s on Reprise, which was owned by his buddy Frank Sinatra.

EMI-Capitol licensed the eight Reprise tracks from the Martin estate, which had purchased them from the label in 1980. Other Martin albums from the Reprise days will also be released by EMI-Capitol in the coming months.

Martin was still part of the comedy team with Jerry Lewis in 1949 when he signed with Capitol. Rather than the artful intensity of Sinatra, Martin’s style was in the more relaxed, crooning tradition of Bing Crosby, who was also a major influence on Sinatra.

Though Martin had earlier hits for Capitol, his first Top 5 success for the label was the playfully romantic “That’s Amore”--a record that pretty much defined Martin’s vocal approach.

His goal was to make his singing seem effortless--like someone in the shower or at a large family picnic.

“If I am relaxed myself, I can relax an audience,” he once said. “That’s one of the secrets of being an entertainer.”

While Martin could step nicely into the big-band turf of Sinatra (as he showed in the way he handled the Nelson Riddle arrangement for Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn’s “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head”), he didn’t seem to mind when the arrangements were built around elements so commercial that they bordered on novelty.

On this album, he moves from the island undercurrents of “Memories Are Made of This” to the slight Presley-esque rock backing of “In the Chapel in the Moonlight” and on to the flat-out country flavor of “Houston.”

Nothing here approaches the ambition or liberating stamp of Sinatra, but Martin’s approach has its own winning, comforting edge.

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*** Dusty Springfield’s “The Very Best of Dusty Springfield,” Mercury. Springfield is one of the most soulful and appealing singers of the modern pop era, but the quality of her material over the years has been notoriously uneven--as demonstrated by a three-disc collection (“The Dusty Springfield Anthology”) that was released last fall by Mercury. There is so much that misfires in “Anthology” that you get the sense that Springfield spent much of her career struggling for the right material and the right producer.

But she has given us more than enough great moments on records (both in her early recordings in her native England and in her classic “Dusty in Memphis” album that she made in 1968 with co-producer Jerry Wexler for Atlantic Records) to give us a four-star single-disc set.

Unfortunately, this one-disc set isn’t that dream package, despite such early hits as “I Only Want to Be With You” and “Wishin’ and Hopin’.” The reason is that the material is limited almost entirely to her work on Philips Records. Only two songs from the vintage Atlantic years (including just one from “Dusty in Memphis”) are featured.

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