The Casino File
By Chuck Darrow
If you think Frank Sinatra acolyte Brandon Tomasello’s July 25 performance at Resorts Casino-Hotel will just be another standard rundown of Ol’ Blue Eyes’ beloved musical canon, you couldn’t be more wrong.
To be sure, 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 vocalist, who’s been mining the immortal entertainer’s songbook for Atlantic City crowds since he was a teenager, will be leaving the Sinatra interstate for a spin through back roads that had gone undiscovered for decades.
Tomasello’s Resorts program is titled “The Lost Sinatra-Basie Show” and includes versions of 11 tunes that Tomasello discovered by accident — and which hadn’t been publicly disseminated until he released his “The Lost Sinatra-Basie” album earlier this year.
The project started when Tomasello was surfing the Internet seeking Sinatra arrangements. His search ultimately took him to the Library of Congress’ website, where a few more clicks revealed to him 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. I know Billy, let’s see what he’s got. And there was this huge list and I’m like, holy crap!’” Tomasello related with a chuckle during a recent phone chat.
The cause of his reaction was the discovery of songs that 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 led by 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 and getting access to them weren’t the same thing. “So, I sat there and I wrote down all the box numbers and the folder numbers, and then I hit a brick wall,” he recalled. “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,’ he continued, referring to the Philadelphia businessman who also served as deputy mayor in the 1990s.
“Tom and his wife Linda have been supporters of mine since I started. 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.”
The contact at the Library of Congress told Tomasello that she’d be able to send the handwritten scores in the collection only if he had written permission from the Byers estate. Not only wasn’t that a problem for Tomasello, it actually provided him 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,” he recalled. “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, 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 on which Tomasello is backed by the popular, Philly-based big band, The City Rhythm Orchestra. That unit will perform at Resorts, as will Bryant Byers, who’ll be flying 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, Camden County. But as far as he’s concerned, Our Town’s oldest legal gaming hall is where it belongs.
“I said we need to do this at a casino, because [the arrangements] were written for [a casino show]. And to do it right, we need to do it in a casino. 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.
Anthony summering
at the Nugget
The best entertainment news we’ve received in a while is that lounge veteran Dane Anthony, who has 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. Sundays (7:30 p.m.), you can catch the group at The Deck, the al fresco saloon adjacent to the Frank S. Farley State Marina.
For more, go to daneanthony.com.
Chuck Darrow has spent more than 40 years writing about Atlantic City casinos.
