Posted on 12/13/2015 3:21:25 PM PST by Bratch
My introduction to Frank Sinatra came by way of “New York, New York” (1979) and “My Way” (1969). Needless to say, I was not a fan. Even as a pre-teen, the over-produced bombast came across as someone, dare I say an old man, trying too hard. Besides, I was born in 1966 and came of age in the early 80s. By law, I was required to worship Springsteen, Seger, Zeppelin, Petty, Van Halen, Def Leppard, and AC/DC, not some crooner belting out anthems about how it’s up to you my way.
With a memory as bad as mine, I don’t have many memories. Flipping through a family photo album can sometimes feel like flipping through someone else’s family photo album. No joke, I have forgotten entire vacations. What I have never forgotten, though, is the moment I fell in love with “The Voice.”
The year was 1985, I was 19 and working in the maintenance department at a nursing home. The radio in the shop was always tuned to WOKY, a station that played only adult standards for folks over the age of a million: Dean Martin, Doris Day, Bing Crosby, Julie London, Vic Damone, Glenn Miller, Peggy Lee, and of course Francis Albert.
To a kid my age, the music played like background music, elevator music. It neither grabbed nor annoyed me. It was just there. That all changed the afternoon Johnny Mercer’s “Summer Wind” came on.
[...] .
Sinatra is our Bach, our Beethoven, our Shakespeare, the artist of our time who will be remembered 500 years from now, 10,000 years from now, for as long as Western Civilization survives.
My list of Sinatra’s 11 greatest songs (other than “Summer Wind”) can be found here.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
Very true. But Sinatra was rather unique in that he had a talent when it came to picking which songs to record, and which songs to pass on.
A Sinatra song is almost by definition a good song.
Yep.
I’ve always been aware of Sinatra...thought he was a good singer, but not all that fond of his style of music.
Last week, I took an international trip to Brazil. On Delta’s entertainment system, they had five Sinatra albums to choose songs from. I picked out 20 or so songs on a playlist, and listened over and over. I was blown away.
I get it now... The guy was a phenomenal singer. His phrasing, pitch, breath control.... Off the charts awesome. I’ve added a couple dozen songs to my iTunes library. One More for the Road? Summer Wind, Wee Small Hours..... All just incredible.
Which wife did he beat?
I’ve never heard that before.
I thought that his acting performance in the Manchurian Candidate was excellent.
Last January I was on a Cathay Pacific flight from Hong Kong to Chicago and listened to a fair amount of Sinatra. Since then I have been paying a lot more attention to the Sinatra channel on my Sirius radio. Great stuff.
Sinatra was a good friend of the mobster, Sam Giancana and perhaps others, but he tried to downplay his Mafia connections, saying he golfed with Giancana and socialized perhaps with some others, but he wasn't involved in their illegal activities. I do know he was investigated by Bobby Kennedy and those alleged Mafia connections were used as an excuse to cancel the Inauguration bash for John Kennedy which Sinatra was to have hosted in his home.
Love his singing...and I also adored him with the great Gene Kelly in Anchors Aweigh.
I tend to agree, but I think some performers just come along at the right time - Jolson, Crosby, Sinatra, Elvis, The Beatles, etc. - and do a good job of taking advantage of the opportunity.
I think he beat them all. Google Frank Sinatra wife beater.
>> Summer Wind is a magnificent song <<
Sure, but in my book, lyricist Johnny Mercer gets at least an equal share of the credit — with at least a hat tip to the unknown Germans who composed the melody.
That being said, Sinatra was clearly the best vocalist of the age. His combination of perfect pitch, perfect diction, jazz-influenced phrasing and emotional talent may never be surpassed. Moreover, without Sinatra’s input, the Great American Songbook would be significantly less great!
I agree that all who contributed to that magical creation deserve to share credit.
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| "If I am captured, I will continue to resist by all means available. I will make every effort to escape and aid others to escape. I will accept neither parole nor special favors from the enemy." |
And because of his fame he often got first pick of songs to record.
Personally, I think someone (a recording studio head, perhaps) put a wee bit of pressure on the Army to keep Sinatra out of the draft. But I have no evidence to back that up. It’s just a guess.
His songs from the Capitol record years are his best work. IMHO. The great American songbook. Where is that CD?
I need more evidence than “google it”.
I always thought his voice was really good in “Anchors Aweigh”.
From Mark Steyn:
Nonetheless, it wouldn’t be half the album it is had not Frank chanced to be driving home through the California desert to his home in Rancho Mirage. He had the radio on, and, of all unlikely things, the disk-jockey played a four-year old Kingston Trio album track: “It Was A Very Good Year”.
It’s an interesting lesson in how Frank thought about music. The Kingston Trio version sounds nothing like a Sinatra song, but he heard the possibilities in it - all the possibilities, indeed, that Bob Shane missed: the loves of one’s life as a series of vintage wines, recollected as if by an old oenophile wandering through his cellar. In his drearily unmusical biography of Sinatra, Anthony Summers cites the theory of the journalist St Clair Pugh that the third verse of “Very Good Year” was a conscious reference to Frank’s affair a decade earlier with Gloria Vanderbilt:
When I was thirty-five
It Was A Very Good Year
It Was A Very Good Year for blue-blooded girls of independent means
We’d ride in limousines
Their chauffeurs would drive
When I was thirty-five...
Oh, for heaven’s sake. When Ervin Drake wrote that lyric, he wasn’t writing with Sinatra in mind and he didn’t know about Frank and Gloria Vanderbilt. It’s the broader trajectory that parallels Sinatra’s life so effortlessly: If you like, the first verse of “small-town girls and soft summer nights” is young Frankie and Nancy, his girl next door back in Hoboken; and the second verse’s “city girls” are the starlets at Metro in his Hollywood days; and the third verse is Ava Gardner, Lauren Bacall and the other A-listers he graduated to in the Fifties. But it’s not meant to be that specific. It’s about the memory of loves as different as great wines, as intoxicating and as impermanent, save for the lingering savor of a sweet taste just beyond your tongue. By 1965, Sinatra was the acknowledged master vintner of alcohol-infused imagery, from “You Go To My Head” to “One For My Baby”, and, unlike Bob Shane, he heard the poetry in Ervin Drake’s words. Of Ol’ Blue Eyes’ record, Shane said simply, “It fit him better than me.” Well, yes. But not just because Frank’s nailed more chicks. In the Shane version, it is, like many folkie songs of the era, a song about singing a song. Sinatra understood it’s meant to be autobiography - not necessarily his but somebody’s:
But now the days grow short
I’m in the autumn of the year
And now I think of my life as vintage wine from fine old kegs
From the brim to the dregs
It poured sweet and clear
It Was A Very Good Year.
...And that’s what he did with “It Was A Very Good Year”: he told the story.
It blew Ervin Drake away. He had no idea that Frank had ever heard of his song, never mind reinvented it. So he was on vacation in Britain when the publisher called him to say he’d received an advance pressing of a new recording of “It Was A Very Good Year” . By Sinatra. “It wasn’t a great phone line,” he said, “but I knew I’d heard a masterpiece, and I fell in love with it, and I’ve never stopped loving it.”
On a TV special later that year, Sinatra, with Jenkins conducting, used “It Was A Very Good Year” as the framing material for a suite of retrospective reflections, each verse of “Good Year” punctuated by a different song - “Young At Heart”, “The Girl Next Door”, “Last Night When We Were Young”, “Hello, Young Lovers”. It’s fine and effective as a one-off, but I don’t think you’d want it that way on the album: “It Was A Very Good Year” is a kind of suite all to itself. As Frank introduced it, sometimes a song can be “the sum and substance of a man’s life” ...but it took Sinatra and Jenkins to draw that out. “I couldn’t imagine that kind of reading,” said Drake. “Nobody had a mind like Sinatra ...and the ability as an actor.”
http://www.steynonline.com/6737/it-was-a-very-good-year
Lots of Steyn reviews of Sinatra songs here:
http://www.steynonline.com/section/18/steyns-song-of-the-week
Another example of Steyn’s outstanding discussions:
In The Wee Small Hours marked an important evolution in Sinatra’s relationship with Capitol Records and Nelson Riddle, and in the evolution of his art. His previous Capitol LPs - Songs For Young Lovers and Swing Easy - were no more or less than what they say: songs that swing, songs of love. But with Wee Small Hours he was attempting to nudge the nascent LP form a bit further. The cover art revives the street lamp from Songs For Young Lovers, but now it’s pure film noir: a lamp post on a deserted street after midnight, a pensive guy leaning against a wall, hat pushed back, cigarette in hand. What is this? The new Mickey Spillane? The poster for this week’s Robert Mitchum movie? No, it’s an album of pop songs, but with a difference: a prototype concept album, in which the songs didn’t exactly tell a story - in the plotted sense of Jack meeting Jill, and then asking her to go up the hill, etc - but they did chart a mood and therefore had a dramatic arc. Later Frank would describe how he would write the song titles on bits of paper, lay them out on the table, and then shuffle them around until they settled into an order that felt right. The order on Wee Small is especially fine: “In The Wee Small Hours”, “Mood Indigo”, “Glad To Be Unhappy”, “I Get Along Without You Very Well”, “I See Your Face Before Me”, “Can’t We Be Friends?” ...get the picture?
But the ambitious form was only possible because of the content - because both Sinatra’s vocal tone and his interpretative powers had matured. And, according to some, because Ava Gardner had just dumped him and he was spilling his guts out. In our piece on “What Is This Thing Called Love?”, the song that opens Side Two of Wee Small Hours, I quote the composer Jule Styne, with whom Frank, post-Ava, had moved in:
I come home at night and the apartment is all dark. I yell, ‘Frank!’ and he doesn’t answer. I walk into the living room and it’s like a funeral parlor. There are three pictures of Ava in the room and the only lights are three dim ones on the pictures. Sitting in front of them is Frank with a bottle of brandy. I say to him, ‘Frank, pull yourself together.’ And he says, ‘Go ‘way. Leave me alone.’ Then all night he paces up and down and says, ‘I can’t sleep, I can’t sleep.’ At four o’clock in the morning I hear him calling someone on the telephone. It’s his first wife, Nancy. His voice is soft and quiet and I hear him say, ‘You’re the only one who understands me.’ Then he paces up and down some more and maybe he reads, and he doesn’t fall asleep until the sun’s up.
In 1955 Sinatra was trapped in the wee small hours. What else was he going to sing about? Yet, while they’re mopey loser downer ballads, this is a jazz album in which Sinatra, while straying true to the storytelling, bends and stretches and phrases more freely than ever before. And the heart of Riddle’s sound for these torch songs of lost love is not the violins but, as Frankologist Will Friedwald points out, “a five-piece rhythm section, with bass, drums, rhythm guitar, and two keyboards - Bill Miller in his regular spot at the piano and guest Paul Smith on the celesta”. And the strings, when he does use them, are not the sugarcoating of romance that even Riddle’s Nat Cole charts fall prey to, but subtly shaded intersections of violins and ‘celli blending with the winds.
Band and singer are as one, from the brief celeste-and-strings intro that sets the stage for Frank’s first bite at the title line. Most singers, sometimes even very good ones, don’t do anything but sing big on the ends of lines. Here Sinatra does the opposite, easing off on the word “morning” and somehow touching loneliness with tenderness.
http://www.steynonline.com/7081/in-the-wee-small-hours-of-the-morning
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