By Jerry Pearce

In the opening chapters of his excellent music biography “Sinatra! The Song Is You,” veteran author Will Friedwald covers, with great detail, the evolution of Sinatra’s musical relationship with the Cole Porter jazz standard “Night and Day,” probably one of the most well-known sets of music and lyrics in the Sinatra singing canon. Listening to Sinatra’s 1957 recording of the tune today, which I played on repeat three times, enjoying the hell out of the arrangement, I was reminded of Friedwald’s painstakingly thorough dissection of this celebrated composition in reference to the Chairman of the Board, and it inspired me to take my own look at the old chestnut.

With the exception of perhaps “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” another Cole Porter masterpiece, Sinatra perhaps got no more mileage greater out of a song then “Night and Day,” and proof of this is ample in the fact that he recorded the tune several times over the years across three record labels, each time offering up a new twist on the arrangement, and in some cases, even the lyrics. Here we look at the facts and figures behind seven different recordings of the song stemming from the 1940s to the 1980s, with Sinatra breathing new, and sometimes, unusual life into the mix each time.