Sinatra! The Song Is You: A Singer's Art
640
Sinatra! The Song Is You: A Singer's Art
640Paperback(Revised and expanded edition)
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781613737705 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Chicago Review Press, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2018 |
| Edition description: | Revised and expanded edition |
| Pages: | 640 |
| Sales rank: | 980,080 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.40(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
"NIGHT AND DAY"
The Sinatra Style
An artist must create a personal cosmos, a verdant world in continuity with tradition, further fulfilling man's "awareness," his "degree of consciousness," and bringing new subtilization, vision, and beauty to the elements of experience. It is in this way that Idea, powered by conviction and necessity, will create its own style and the singular, momentous structure capable of realizing its intent.
— Leon Kirchner (American composer, 1919–2009)
"Why is it," one late-night comic asked in the late 1980s, "that when either Frank Sinatra or the president is in New York, all the hookers suddenly get better looking?" The hubbub regarding a visit from the chief executive can be easily understood. But how could we account for the disruptive power of this swinging septuagenarian, especially in the city that's seen it all? Nearing the end of his long career, Sinatra was undeniably a dinosaur. But like those two-hundred-million-year-old brontosauri that are let loose in twentieth-century Manhattan in all those 1950s B movies, he still had the power to trample the city beneath his feet.
The era that spawned Sinatra "is no more," as P. G. Wodehouse wrote of the England of his youth. "It is gone with the wind. It is one with Nineveh and Tyre." If mankind has been around for only a few minutes in the calendar of the cosmos, then the Sinatra epoch flourished and then was finished in a brief, shining microsecond. The concept of something like quality in what we call American popular culture doesn't even amount to a momentary aberration. The idea that music could have substance as well as mass-marketability came into being at the end of World War I. It reached a climax during World War II and slowly fizzled out during the Vietnam War in the 1960s.
The dinosaur metaphor falls apart at this point, because Sinatra can't be compared to a lumbering behemoth who flattened the earth for eons, but rather to some magnificent beast whose entire existence came and went in the twinkling of an eye. Sinatra further represents a unique case where the greatest example of a breed happened to be the one to weather the decades as if in his own personal time capsule — one with hot and cold running babes, a private stock of Jack Daniel's, and no photographers.
The mom-and-pop store that was the music industry in Sinatra's heyday had long since been demolished to make room for the superhighway of lowest-common-denominator culture. Still, Sinatra has dominated the last thirty years — the age of digitally-distributed music — perhaps even more completely than he had any previous period. (Even by 1994, there were no fewer than 283 Sinatra entries listed in a database of compact discs then available.) At the time of Sinatra's "Diamond Jubilee," in honor of his seventy-fifth birthday, while the grandchildren of Sinatra's first audience, the World War II generation, prepared for new global conflicts (with the Bosnian War occurring roughly simultaneously with the first Gulf War), Sinatra product continued to move in quantities that the music industry traditionally describes in terms of precious metals.
As Sinatra's own career arrived at its conclusion and that much-mentioned "final curtain" became more concrete than mythic, it became increasingly clear how much he meant to all of us. So much of our lives have been lived to the soundtrack of Sinatra music, it's hard to tell where our actual experiences end and those we've felt vicariously through Sinatra lyrics begin. Even as early as my thirties, I had long since lost the ability to distinguish whether some event had really happened to me or if I had just experienced it vicariously through a Sinatra song. It's almost as if he had rather literally implanted his narratives into our memories (almost like the Communist brainwashing conspirators do to Sinatra and Laurence Harvey in the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate). The Sinatra-inspired "memories" amount to a collective stock-footage library of shared experiences. Most of us can feel the small-town episode of "It Was a Very Good Year" amazingly vividly even if we've never been in a village more rural than Greenwich. As film director and cultural commentator Peter Bogdanovich once put it, Sinatra's songs aren't only his autobiography, they are ours as well.
The late Gordon Jenkins once explained: "Frank does one word in 'Send in the Clowns,' which is my favorite of the songs we did together, and it's the damnedest thing I've ever heard. He just sings the word 'farce,' and your whole life comes up in front of you. He puts so much in that phrase that it just takes a hold of you." Where other singers, at best, work with lyrics and melodies, Sinatra dealt in mental images and pure feelings that he seemed to summon up almost without the intervention of composers, arrangers, and musicians, as vital as their contributions were. (In fact, Sinatra was so sure of his relationship with his audience that he gladly acknowledged orchestrators and songwriters in his spoken introductions to each number. How could it take away from what he did to mention the men who put the notes and words on paper when it was he who imbued them with all of their meaning?)
Sinatra was often larger than life, projecting heightened emotions through intensified vocal gestures. At other times Sinatra was whisperingly intimate, underplaying every note and every emotion to extract the most believability out of a text. At still other times Sinatra was dead-on, having reached a point where we could no longer discern between the part of him that was engaged in what was ultimately a theatrical performance and the real-life man himself. In many numbers — such as his 1961 version of "Without a Song"— Sinatra was all three things at different points in the same song.
There were times when Sinatra acted as if the lyric didn't mean anything to him at all, as with a new novelty number (such as "The Hucklebuck") or an archaic throwaway revived as a "rhythm song" (such as "My Blue Heaven") that he just wanted to have fun with and not be expected to take seriously. When Sinatra titled one 1956 album Songs for Swingin' Lovers! it wasn't just a marketing hook but an accurate manifestation of his musical-dramatic ambitions; Sinatra showed the world how a singer could be at once romantic and rhythmically playful. His milestone performance of "I've Got You Under My Skin" (on Swingin' Lovers) has Sinatra being supremely sensitive to the intimate nuances of Cole Porter's lyric at one moment and then, eight bars later, being swaggeringly indifferent to it. When Sinatra adds an ad-lib line, most famously "it repeats — how it yells — in my ear," he's kidding the text even while he underscores it. (These genuinely spontaneous interjections he varied from performance to performance.)
"Frank's appeal is so great and so wide, I think, because it boils down to one thing: You believe that he's singing [directly] to you," explained Frank Military, Sinatra's right-hand man for roughly ten years, beginning in 1951. "If you go to any of the concerts, you'll see truck drivers and prizefighters and all kinds of people, and they just go crazy over him. You'll see people that were there from the beginning, his [original] audience, all those older folks who were there at the Paramount in 1941 and 1942. You can talk to them, as well as to the new audience that he gets, the young kids today, and every one of them swears that Sinatra sang to them personally."
Sinatra's most appealing talent may have been his capacity for emotional expressiveness. As time went on, he played an increasingly finely tuned instrument, not only with a broader range at the bottom and top — sadder sads and happier happies — but with more degrees between the peaks. He could develop fifteen different kinds of post–"I've Got You Under My Skin" climax-building euphoria on A Swingin' Affair!, get you to feel pensive and squirmy twelve different ways on Where Are You?, splash cold water in your face from twelve surprising angles on Come Swing with Me!, or even "kvell" fifteen different finger-snapping ways on the masterpiece Songs for Swingin' Lovers! Even more effective are the ways he increased the emotional, no less than the musical, pitch within a single track: "You Make Me Feel So Young" modulates from mere cheerfulness to exalted rapture so overpoweringly it could make a statue want to fall in love.
Sinatra's vocal range extended all the way up to the stratospheric falsetto note that he used to climax the Axel Stordahl arrangement of "The Song Is You"— a very high F (two Fs above middle C). In the Capitol and early Reprise eras, his top note would more likely be the high F he attained on "The Tender Trap," going down to the ultradeep, Jolsonian low G that concluded his show-stopping 1960s treatment of "Ol' Man River." (He also hit subterranean basement-level low notes on the 1959 "Cottage for Sale" and the 1969 "Wave.") Taken in toto, this amounts to a span of nearly two octaves, yet as longtime accompanist Bill Miller cautioned, he reserved those extremes purely for occasional dramatic emphasis. His "practical range," as Miller put it, was rarely quite so high or so low.
While Sinatra had a wonderful voice, he was not a vocal virtuoso. There are popular singers whose techniques are superior to Sinatra's, among them Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Vic Damone, and Billy Eckstine. Sinatra's spiritual father, Bing Crosby, perhaps had a greater gift for resonant melody, and Sinatra presented himself as a practitioner of pure power-singing only in the mid-1940s, when he was promoted as, appropriately, "The Voice." In his personal and professional upheavals of the early 1950s, he lost a lot of that wind power and, truth to tell, would go on to very gradually lose more and more of it in the decades that followed.
But what he substituted for pure technique in the very good years that followed his youth would prove to be far more meaningful. His ability to tell a story consistently grew sharper even as the voice grew deeper and the textures surrounding it richer. Generally, rhythm and dynamics are discussed as if they are two distinct qualities, but with Sinatra they're inseparable. They amount to the primary tools through which he afforded varying degrees of weight to key phrases. That weight of emphasis can be applied in terms of both duration — the length of time that he held the note (rhythm) — or in the volume level at which he chose to hit it (dynamics). Before Sinatra, loud generally tended to mean long, but The Voice opened up a whole new world of rhythmic-dynamic thinking in which soft notes could be indefinitely extended for greater emotional effect.
The cumulative effect was to make any word sound more like what it was. Sammy Cahn, the lyricist who was closest to Sinatra personally, observed, "When he sings 'lovely,' he makes it sound 'lovely' as in 'weather-wise it's such a 'lo-ovely day'" (in Cahn's own lyric to "Come Fly with Me"). Cahn demonstrated to me, caressing and extending the long soft vowel sound at the center. "Likewise, when he sings 'lonely' [in "Only the Lonely"] he makes it into such a lonely word."
We could sum up Sinatra's capacity for rhythm with the word "swing," but in saying that we should stay aware that the term means a lot of things. Count Basie's kind of swing is different from Louis Armstrong's, and Sinatra is no less the creator of his own, unique rhythmic idiom. Particularly in conjunction with his longtime colleague and arranger Nelson Riddle, Sinatra masterminded a rhythmic feeling that the team mutually characterized as the "tempo of the heartbeat."
The basic Sinatra-Riddle beat amounts to a bridge between the fourfour time signature, played by most swing-era bands, and the two-four beat that an earlier Sinatra collaborator, Sy Oliver, perfected for Jimmie Lunceford and then brought with him to Tommy Dorsey. "Frank likes the Buddy Rich style," said pianist Lou Levy, "the Tommy Dorsey band style, which he was raised on, you could say. The band had so much talent, I'm sure it affected him and stayed with him. That's where his taste was formulated. He's a swing-era guy: Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Duke Ellington."
Even if that Swingin' Lovers beat is the one we most identify with Sinatra, he mastered other time signatures as well, especially the straight-down-the-middle four-four he utilized in albums with Count Basie, Johnny Mandel, and Neal Hefti. Although he was never completely comfortable with waltzes, Sinatra once made an entire album of ballads, All Alone (1962), in three-four time, in which he brilliantly takes advantage of his tentativeness in that time signature and turns it into an asset; that slight hesitation makes these vintage songs of love and loss even more moving.
In one of the few interviews where Sinatra talked about his sense of rhythm, he said, "I think that that's kind of inbred. I think you have or you haven't got it. I'm probably one of the fortunate people to whom it was given. I never thought about it much." Typically, Sinatra then gave credit for his success in this area to his accompanists. "If I do a jump arrangement with a band, either on records or on a stage, I find that if the band doesn't settle down into a proper tempo, then you cannot swing. I don't care how good you are, it just doesn't move."
"Once while I was driving I heard an old record by Frank and Nelson, and I had to get out of the car and call the radio station," trumpeter Zeke Zarchy told me. "It was 'The Way You Look Tonight' [from Academy Award Winners, 1964]. The greatest thing I ever heard! I defy any instrumentalist to swing like he does with his voice on that record."
On another occasion, Billy May, the great big-band writer who frequently worked with Sinatra from the mid-1940s to the mid-1980s, was asked if he considered Sinatra a jazz singer. He answered that it depended on how one defines the term. "If your definition of a jazz singer is someone who can approach [a song] like an instrumentalist and get [the written melody] across but still have a feeling of improvisation, a freshness to it, and do it a little bit differently every time, then I would agree that Frank is."
Which isn't to say that Sinatra was strictly a jazz guy all the time, the way Betty Carter was. "I'm not so sure that being a jazz musician is that all-inclusive," trombonist Milt Bernhart, who should know, elaborated. "A jazz musician usually is somebody who refuses to do anything else, like Miles Davis and John Coltrane. But I wouldn't say that Duke Ellington was purely a jazz musician. I mean, when you've got an orchestra and they're all up there playing together and it's so beautiful, I wouldn't necessarily call that jazz. I would call that music. I'll bet if you were to ask Sinatra, 'Do you consider yourself a jazz singer?,' he would probably respond, 'Hey, I'm a singer.' And even when he sings a song exactly the way it's written, that's good enough for me."
Apart from jazz, big bands, and great singers like Ella Fitzgerald, Sinatra's other great musical love is classical music. "He's really interested in good music," May pointed out. "He and his wife and my wife and I have gone to the symphony a couple of times together. He astounds me with how really knowledgeable he is about classical music. We went one night, and he was telling me about how he liked [Soviet composer] Reinhold Glière. Now, Glière was a contemporary of Rimsky-Korsakov and a fairly obscure Russian composer. For Sinatra to have even heard of him shows he knows a lot." Eleanor Slatkin, who with her husband Felix (Riddle's preferred concertmaster and the conductor of the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra) saw quite a lot of Sinatra socially in the Capitol era, remarked, "Every time we went to his house, he always had classical music on. I don't remember hearing anything but classical and opera. And, of course, he [was] very knowledgeable and [knew] many of the artists personally."
While Sinatra may have occasionally employed backdrops that reflected his appreciation of European classical music, in his own singing he owes far more to Crosby than to Caruso. Even on the dozen or so songs based on classical themes that Sinatra recorded (mainly in the 1940s), he constantly altered the material in a way a lieder or opera singer wouldn't. Even when singing the melodic intervals exactly as notated, Sinatra can't help doing creative and interesting things with the rhythm. He never stops playing with the tempo, whether the piece is serious, romantic, or swinging. In fact, it's easier to list the songs where he does sit squarely on the beat — as on parts of "I Whistle a Happy Tune" and his original coda to "Anything Goes" on Songs for Swingin' Lovers! ("may I say before this record spins to a close?") — than to cover the endless occasions when he lags behind it or rushes ahead of it for musical and dramatic effect. (In Sinatra's era, jazz and pop singers weren't expected to read music or "sight sing," but it's said that when he saw, for instance, a C next to a D-sharp, he had a definite idea of what that interval should sound like.)
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Sinatra! The Song Is You"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Will Friedwald.
Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword Tony Bennett vii
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction to the 2018 Edition xv
1 "Night and Day": The Sinatra Style 1
The Skinny Years: "Of Love and Youth and Spring"
2 "For Old Times' Sake": Hoboken and Harry, 1915-1939 47
3 With Tommy Dorsey, 1940-1942 67
4 With Axel Stordahl, 1943-1948 115
5 All the In-Between Years, 1948-1953 159
The Hat Years: "The Afternoon of a Faun"
6 With Nelson Riddle, 1953-1979 205
7 With Billy May, 1953-1979 291
8 Gordon Jenkins and the Search for Long Forms, 1956-1981 341
The Tux Years: "The Lion in Winter"
9 Looking for the Hook, 1960-1971 397
10 "OI" Blue Eyes Is Back": The Concert Years, 1973-1994 505
Postscript 592
A Note on Sources 595
Consumer Guide and Compact Discography 597
Index 610
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