A Pair Of Kings

By JAY COCKS

PERFORMER: TONY BENNETT

ALBUM: PERFECTLY FRANK

LABEL: COLUMBIA

THE BOTTOM LINE: A lilting, jazz-inflected homage from one great singer to another.

Me and My Shadow isn't a song usually associated with Frank Sinatra, so it has no proper place in this collection. Yet its presence would have set up a handy symbolic resonance. Tony Bennett, one of the supreme purveyors of popular song, here assembles 24 tunes associated with, and made popular by, Sinatra, ory days: the big-band beginnings, the series of alternately bleak ) and swinging LPs like In the Wee Small Hours and A Swingin' Affair -- concept albums before anyone had cooked up the phrase -- that carried Sinatra triumphantly through the 1950s to the pinnacle of his craft. Bennett, at this time, was enjoying significant success on his own, and though his celebrity missed the mythic dimension of Sinatra's, he did not lack for proper respect. Sinatra often singled him out for special praise and on occasion even called him his favorite singer.

Bennett's masterstroke is to perform the songs in a way that Sinatra almost never does: in a trio setting. The tunes take on an unburnished immediacy, an instant intimacy that taps straight into Bennett's gift for making a lyric seem like a conversation and a melody like the true rhythm of the heart. With the Ralph Sharon Trio playing suavely behind him, Bennett can even make over Nancy, an early and particularly personal hit that evokes the memory of Sinatra's first wife, into a singular valentine to first love. Working his way up to One for My Baby, Bennett takes a big chance with a brash, almost R.-and- B. tempo. Sinatra's definitive version was an envoi to a lost love and a derailed life; Bennett's is a swagger, a roguish kiss-off.

Perfectly Frank is untainted by nostalgia, but from the opening song, Time After Time, through the last, I'll Be Seeing You, there is a continual undercurrent of melancholy, a gentle mood of loss and time remembered. Not better times, necessarily, and not better music, but a time when a singer could sing from a certain elegance of the heart. That may be what whole generations heard in Sinatra and what so many singers learned from him. And that's what Tony Bennett has done here: said thanks, brilliantly. His way, all the way.