Frank Sinatra acolyte Brandon Tomasello’s July 25 performance at Resorts Casino-Hotel will be more than just another rundown of Ol’ Blue Eyes’ beloved musical canon.
The program will include a number of Sinatra signatures, but “My Way” and “New York, New York” – or anything else he released after 1966 – won’t be among them. That’s because the 32-year-old Tomasello, who’s been mining the immortal entertainer’s songbook for AC crowds since he was a teen, will leave the Sinatra interstate for a spin on back roads gone undiscovered for decades.
Tomasello’s Resorts presentation is called “The Lost Sinatra-Basie Show” and includes versions of 11 tunes he discovered by accident and didn’t publicly perform until he released his “The Lost Sinatra-Basie” album earlier this year.
The project started when Tomasello surfed the internet seeking Sinatra arrangements. His search ultimately took him to the Library of Congress website, where he found a collection of material that had been donated by the estate of the late arranger Billy Byers, who died in 1996.
“I’m like, ‘Well, let’s go,'” Tomasello recalled. “I know Billy. Let’s see what he’s got. And there was this huge list and I’m like, holy crap!'” he related in a recent phone call.
The collections’ songs had been prepared for Sinatra’s winter, 1966 performances at the old Sands casino in Las Vegas. Musical backup for those shows was provided by the big band of yet another 20th-century musical titan, Wiliam “Count” Basie. The cache included 11 tunes – including “Too Marvelous for Words” “All the Way” and the never-before heard “Lover Come Back to Me” – that for whatever reason weren’t on the set list the night Sinatra’s “Live at the Sands” LP was recorded.
But discovering the charts’ existence wasn’t the same as getting access.
“So, I sat there and I wrote down all the box numbers and the folder numbers, and then I hit a brick wall,” Tomasello remembered. “I came back to reality and thought, ‘How are you going get these? It’s the Library of Congress. You’re not a researcher. They’re not going to do anything for you.’ And I felt defeated.
“And then I said to myself, ‘Wait a minute. If somebody has a connection at the Library of Congress, it would be … Tom Knox,’ Tomasello added, referring to the Philadelphia businessman who also was the city’s deputy mayor in the 1990s.
“Tom and his wife Linda have been supporters of mine since I started,” Tomasello noted. “They always came to see me sing in the lounge at Resorts.”
It turned out Tomasello’s instincts were right on the money.
“I called Tom and said, ‘Do we have any connection at the Library of Congress?’ And he laughed and he said, ‘I’m on the board of the Library of Congress!’ “I said, ‘Well, you’re gonna make this happen.’ And he set me up with the woman that handles the music there.”
That Library of Congress employee said she could send Tomasello the handwritten scores in the collection only if he had written permission from the Byers’ estate. Not only wasn’t that a problem, it actually provided Tomasello with a crucial piece of the puzzle in the form of Byers’ son, Bryant, who wound up joining Tomasello on his quest to revive the long-lost arrangements.
“She sent me Bryant’s (contact info) and I sent him an email, but didn’t get a response,” Tomasello recounted. “I waited a few days, called him, didn’t get a response. And then, like a day or two later, I got a phone call, and it was Bryant. Turns out he was on vacation in the mountains.
“I explained to him what was going on,” Tomasello added, “what we wanted to do, and he didn’t even realize that his mother had donated all of this stuff to the Library of Congress. He wrote me an authorization letter that gave me permission (to access) the full collection.”
Bryant also agreed to play trombone on the album, which has Tomasello backed by the popular, Philly-based big band, The City Rhythm Orchestra. That unit will perform at Resorts, as will Bryant, who will fly in from Oregon for the gig.
The Resorts’ show will be just the second performance of the “Lost” material; Tomasello debuted it earlier this year at the Scottish Rite Auditorium in Collingswood. But as far as he’s concerned, the oldest legal gaming hall outside Nevada is where it belongs.
“I said we need to do this at a casino, because (the arrangements) were written for (a casino show),” he said. “And, of course, anytime I think of an Atlantic City casino, my first thought is Resorts. That’s my home. That’s where I started.”
For tickets, go to ticketmaster.com.
Summer at the Nugget
The best entertainment news we’ve received in a while is that lounge veteran Dane Anthony, who’s been electrifying local casino audiences for decades, is making Golden Nugget Atlantic City his home for the summer.
The Dane Anthony Band hits the stage of the bayside pleasure dome’s Rush bar every Thursday at 8 p.m., and at 7:30 p.m. on Sundays. You can also catch the group at The Deck, the al fresco saloon adjacent to the Frank S. Farley State Marina.
For more, go to daneanthony.com.
Correction:
A previous column incorrectly stated the website for tickets to the Aug. 2 performance of Ginuwine at Rivers Casino Philadelphia. It is etix.com.
