It was early 1992. Jenny and I were humming away as we left the Entertainment Centre after Frank Sinatra’s last concert in Sydney.
A stranger walking in front of us turned. “It’s amazing!” he said, as if we’d known each other for years. “He could have sung every song he recorded and we’d still have known the lyrics.”
And he was right. Sinatra recorded over 2000 songs and almost 300 albums and there wasn’t a song the audience hadn’t heard countless times. We’d come to listen, pay homage, tap our toes, sway, clap and regale at this sprightly gnome of 75 who’d been part of our lives for ever. So what if the voice had declined and the high notes were a bit ragged and ‘My Way’ had to be sung in a lower key. That ole black magic had us in his spell and he made us f-e-e-l so young again. It was mass hypnosis. A drug, if you like, with a goody-goody afterglow.
Such charisma. And yet, so much controversy. A manic-depressive. A volatile temper ignited by the shortest of fuses. The son of a Hoboken midwife who performed illegal abortions, ran a tavern during prohibition and demanded favours for flying the Democratic Party flag. A father who expected his only son to follow in his own firemen’s footsteps – a job acquired through his wife’s influence. A scrawny little kid with Spock-like ears who lasted 47 days in high-school before expulsion where reading was a handicap. Whose only ambition was to sing in a band like his idol, Bing Crosby. And with no little help from his friends, he did. Not even Mama Sinatra, who wanted Frankie to grow up an engineer or at least a doctor, helped. Sinatra did it his way even at this early stage, first with the Harry James band and 6 months later, Tommy Dorsey. He had only to open his mouth, sway neither here nor there and all ‘the gals swooned.’
They tagged him ‘The Voice’ – a public relations exercise at first – but the hype matched the product. Some likened him to his idol Der Bingle but Sinatra from the very beginning was above crooning. His voice was high, smooth with no hint of swooping. He sang his notes cleanly and effortlessly. He introduced bel canto to popular music. Part of his Italian heritage. He sang on the breath and used his vowels to accentuate the legato in his voice. His control was flawless, fashioned on the prodigious exploits of Dorsey who could blow into a trombone while simultaneously inhaling from the corners of his mouth.
His initial musical inspiration was Jasha Heifetz. He was fascinated by the way Heifetz fashioned his notes. Holding, sliding and sustaining them. “It was a whole new concept of phrasing to me,'” he said later. “And very exciting.”
At first his songs were sonatas for words. Some moody, others romantic. Even the swinging numbers were sung with un fillo di soffio – a thread of breath. In time, he learnt how to change his vocal timbre to accommodate ballads and swingers. For the time being his bass notes were non-existent and he relied solely on the purity of his delivery. It was good enough for the bobby-soxers to swoon over and for their mothers eventually to forget the menfolk banished to a distant war, perhaps never to return. New words were invented to describe the phenomena – swoonatra, sinatrics, swingatra, sinatrauma etc. And through it all, Sinatra cultivated the image of a home-loving-family-oriented-gauche-big-blue-eyed-ever-smiling kid next door.
From the beginning Sinatra realised the value of words. His diction was impeccable. Each nuance, each slackening of intensity became personal – as if singing to you and you alone. Later, when his baritone came to the fore and the recording techniques improved, he manipulated words to suit the mood of the song. He became the master of suspended phrases, allowing inflections to convey more than the word itself. His early songs were cries from the heart but lacked subtlety, but later a combination of tobacco consumption, a jigger or two of Jack Daniels per day and a lifetime of carousing eventually forced him to improve his delivery and emerge with more style than ever before.
In 1952 he quit recording with Mitch Miller’s Columbia Records because of what he called “decadent, bloodless songs”. Two years later, despite scandalous goings-on with Ava Gardner and trouble and strife with wife Nancy, despite a sharp decline in popularity because he wouldn’t sing the kind of stuff that made guys like Frankie Laine (Mule Train), Johnny Ray, Eddie Fisher and Guy Mitchell (My Heart Cries for You) famous, despite the loss of his prize possession – his voice, and despite accusations of sporadic facial re-arrangements without prior consent, Capitol Records extended a lifeline and allowed him to record a couple of grooves. By then Sinatra wasn’t a total has-been – he had already won the Oscar for From Here to Eternity.
Those couple of grooves – single recordings of Young at Heart and Three Coins in the Fountain – proved so successful, he was turned loose to record two 10-inch albums with rookie conductor/arranger Nelson Riddle. Both albums – Songs for Young Lovers and Swing Easy – were unique in many ways. They were one of the first albums conceived with a common theme running through the songs and they introduced a deeper-sounding Sinatra to brass instruments that rasped a rhythmic pattern while the strings fiddled about filling in gaps. It suited Sinatra’s voice. His style was still relaxed. But now that his control of breath was less than immaculate, he perfected a technique of tonal quality that placed his voice in the same position before and after breaths, ensuring smooth and natural sounding phrases. But how did he manage to make his breath intakes inaudible on disc? It is still a puzzlement!
Two albums later, the same combination produced the epitome in groovy albums – Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! (1956). It brought Sinatra back into the big time. With a healthy contribution from trombonist Milt Bernhart in I’ve Got You Under My Skin the album created a sensation. It left the 1944 Axel Strodahl version with mixed voices and dance tempi sounding as incongruous as a mediaeval friar lost in a Kings Cross bordello.
Stordahl had been Dorsey’s arranger and accompanied Sinatra when the latter launched his solo career in 1943. It proved invaluable to Sinatra’s development. The dance tempi disappeared and, for the first time, Sinatra was allowed to explore his own creative soul. When Nelson Riddle arrived on the scene, Stordahl’s arrangements had already fallen out of grace. The middle 50s was the era of novelty songs like Come on a my House and How Much is that Doggie in the Window. The big beat, and eventually rock and roll, was just around the corner and people expected more dynamism in popular songs.
Sinatra still believed words were a potent part of any song and he stuck to his guns even though it proved a temporary setback. But the arrangements had to keep abreast with developments. Stordahl’s persistent use of strings and woodwinds and brass purely as a melodic instrument, made him a musical misfit. Even in his later efforts, one of Sinatra’s final albums with Capitol, Point of no Return (1962), Stordahl lacked the zip, creativity and panache expected from a contemporary orchestrator. He had exceeded his use-by date. It was no longer the era of pretty counter-melodies and neat harmonies.
Enter Gordon Jenkins. Jenkins was a conductor/composer who started off as a piano-player and stumbled into orchestration because he ‘learnt to play every instrument in the orchestra’. Jenkins succeeded Stordahl as arranger of Sinatra’s ballads. Nelson Riddle had made a few albums in that vein, notably In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning (1955) and Only the Lonely (1958) but Jenkins with his lush violin sound, muted French horns, the occasional oboe and a noticeable lack of percussion enhanced the romantic mood Sinatra had striven to re-discover. Jenkins’ sound was derived by stacking different instruments in octave layers and allowing them to meander above the often discordant notes of the horns. His ‘simplistic’ approach wasn’t appreciated by contemporaries, especially Sinatra’s regular accompanist, Bill Miller. Nevertheless, Sinatra persisted, The arrangements gave his forlorn songs a dimension of emptiness while the bitter-sweet harmonies emphasised the melancholy mood of the lyrics. Sinatra re-invented himself as the guru of sadness, the despairing person looking for solace in a word or a phrase. Staring at an empty glass. Music to die for.
The Sinatra/Jenkins collaboration reached its pinnacle with the 1959 release of No One Cares. Here Sinatra pours all the frustrations, disappointments and failures of the past 40 years into words that are spoken musically at a pace that is fascinatingly morbid. It is one thing to sing uptempo numbers, Billy May’s for example, where the backing distracts from the vocals. The true measure of an artist is when the voice competes with emotions, when the phrasing is an endless sequence of colours and when the singer and listener silently nod to each other in sympathy.
Some of the songs are not easy. Listen as Sinatra sings ‘The keys in the mailbox the same as before/But no one is waiting for me anymore’ in A Cottage for Sale. Sinatra sings in semitones and accidentals. Not easy when your support is playing something different, at times in a strange key. Listen also to the chill Sinatra infuses on the words ‘cold rainy day’ in Here’s that Rainy Day. It’s worth the price of an extra jumper just to hear it!
The other albums of note that Jenkins arranged for Sinatra are Where are You? (1957) and All Alone (1962). The former includes a very, very restrained version of Bernstein’s Lonely Town, a song Sinatra was not allowed to sing in the film version of On The Town and one Jenkins felt was one of Sinatra’s best. Here, the orchestration and the deliberate tread of the words – delivered in quasi-parlando – evoke the eerie stillness of an alien environment. All Alone includes sad, sad versions of standards all played in 3/4 time – including The Girl Next Door – and 5 songs composed by Irving Berlin.
But perhaps the best song Sinatra ever recorded doesn’t rely on any fancy orchestration but simply on Bill Miller’s piano accompaniment. One for my Baby. It is simple but it says a lot. It says more than My Way or September of my Years. Tinged with loneliness, it epitomises Francis Albert Sinatra.
Cheers Frank!