Let's Talk Sinatra

Cafe Society
1

Okay, over in the ‘greatest rock vocalists’ thread, I said that if the list were modified to be ‘greatest pop singer’, Sinatra would win. That was followed immediately after by two messages from people who don’t like Sinatra and don’t ‘get’ him.

So, let’s talk about Sinatra. What makes him great? Or if you don’t think he is, why not?

Here’s my .02. First, Sinatra was very innovative. Go listen to pop music from the 30’s and early 40’s, and listen to how they used singers. The band was always at the forefront, with singers providing background or telling a story. But it had a flat quality to it - groups of females were often used as sort of a human string section with ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ in the background. Males just sang notes. But all of the inflection, the life of the music came from the band.

When Sinatra sang with Tommy Dorsey, it was considered a coup to become a singer FOR the band. It was all about Tommy Dorsey’s band, and the vocalist was just there to add a little more to the music. But Sinatra took it to a whole new level. He studied the way Dorsey played his trombone, the way he imparted emotion into the sound, and he copied it. As time went on, he outgrew the band behind him and became a star in his own right.

So Sinatra was innovative. He changed the nature of popular music. Innovation is one of my criteria for ‘great singer’.

Then there’s emotion. Sinatra was an interpretive singer. He had exquisite timing, which he often employed unusually to give emphasis to certain parts of his songs - dragging the start of certain beats and rushing others for effect, while being absolutely precise where it counted. Plus, his phrasing was unique - he would pinch off the end of notes to make them sound sadder, glide between others, hit some staccato - in short, he used his voice like a virtuoso instrumentalist uses his instrument. There’s a lot more to singing than just being able to hit the notes - something singers like Mariah Carey should learn. Sinatra was the king of vocally-imposed emotion. When he sings “It was a very good year”, you can just hear the sad tired man singing the song. When he sings “That’s life”, he makes the whole song sound defiant. When he sang ‘My Way’, it came out triumphant. Lesser singers attacking the same music either copy Sinatra exactly, or make it sound flat and lifeless.

I think that many of the people who don’t ‘get’ Sinatra just haven’t listened to him closely enough. If you listen to Sinatra as background music, he can sound like just another old crooner. But if you’ve got a Sinatra CD, I recommend putting it on, turning down the lights, and really listening to what he’s doing. You might find yourself appreciating him a whole lot more.

2

Wooo-doggie! A Frank Sinatra thread!

Sinatra learned his breathing technique from Dorsey as well; that’s what enabled him to phrase and time his singing the way he did. Probably the first time a singer took phrasing lessons from a trombonist.

Sinatra sang, especially in his post-“From Here to Eternity” career (1953), like he had lived what he’s singing about…and in most cases he did. His best recordings really do come after '53; his voice mellowed like old scotch, a lifetime of remarkable success and crashing failures (he had attempted suicide in the early 50s) seeps its way into each phrase and note. There really has never been a singer like him, though his great rival Bing Crosby comes close.

Unfortunately it’s the cariacature most people remember, the tough Hoboken thug pushing around his colleagues and underlings, the tenuous mob connections, the gossipy tales of wretched excess…so what? Vermeer was probably a prick, too. Doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the paintings.

My Sinatra pick for the uninitiated is Only the Lonely, a real stunner; listen to the closing of “Angel Eyes” as Sinatra thunders, “'scuuuuuuuuuuse me…while I disappear…” and feel every hair stand on end.

His most underappreciated recording? Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim.

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I think a lot of “young” (under 50) people mainly know the Sinatra of the 70s and 80s, when his voice truly had started to go and he was just another celebrity famous for being famous. They aren’t as familiar with the great recordings he did in the 50s and 60s. And of course the rock’n’roll zeitgeist of the 60s and 70s held Sinatra and his music to be passe.

Another way that Sinatra was innovative: he was making “concept albums” like September of My Years long before the Beatles (or the Pretty Things, or the Kinks, etc. etc.)

4

Frank rules. Everyone knows that. You expressed a lot of reasons, such as innovation and how good an intepreter of songs he was… he actually seems to know what the words are instead of simply singing them. I’ll just add that he was an excellent decision maker for what songs to sing, and usually put together really good bands behind him.

Most people know a few tracks from 1940s films, and then the jowly Sinatra of the 70s singing My Way. The best stuff was recorded in the 50s and 60s. The four or five albums he did with Nelson Riddle, I think, are maybe the best stretch of releases by any singer in American history.

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I respect Sinatra and realize he was one of the great popular singers of the 40s and 50s.

I just don’t like him. I don’t find his renditions particularly impressive – his jazzy, shoobie doobie style trashes more songs than it improves.

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I have to disagree with you here: in the pre-Sinatra period, vocalists almost always got top billing. (The “vocal group as background harmony” thing came around in the later 1940s.)

Helen Forrest with the Benny Goodman or Harry James Orchestra; Billie Holliday with the Teddy Wilson Orchestra; Anita O’Day and the Gene Krupa Band; Bing Crosby or Irene Taylor with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra; Ivie Andersen or Al Hibbler and the Duke Ellington Orchestra; Big Joe Turner and the Count Basie Band.

Oh, yeah…there were some guys with horns back there behind the singer. Like Bix Beiderbecke and Lester Young and Johnny Hodges and Roy Eldridge. But THEY didn’t get their pictures on the poster.

I won’t argue with the rest of your thesis, as I am a huge Sinatra fan. Rather than explain why, I’d direct you to Riding on a Blue Note: Jazz and American Pop, the first collection of essays by critic Gary Giddins. There’s a compelling piece in there about how the four defining male pop vocalists of the last century were Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Elvis Presley, that’ll give you loads of ammunition in your next argument with a callow Gen-Y music buff.

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Well … in the 30s it was really a little from column A, a little from column B. Yes, singers would sometimes get billing over the orchestra on records, but certainly not always (E.g. Holliday got no billing at all for her early sides with Wilson, and I’m fairly sure Al Hibbler never got billed above Ellington, even though that was during the “vocalist era”.) Nonwithstanding the billing on the label, its was the band that was the overall star: Goodman was a bigger star than Forrest, Krupa a bigger star than O’Day, Ellington a bigger star than Andersen or Hibbler, Basie a bigger star than Turner, etc.

Every so often a singer would become more popular than the band they worked for and go off to do their own thing, e.g. Crosby and Holliday. But it was the bands who were the center of attention, since they were the ones who could keep the audience dancing for hours. It was called the big band era for a reason, after all…

Then along comes the mid 40s, Sinatra, and the end of WWII. Big bands collapsed, and the vocalists flourished. This change is often attributed to the influence of Sinatra, but the root cause was the end of America’s generation-long love affair with social dancing coinciding with the end of the war. Staying up till 3 am doing the Lindy Hop was out; moving to the suburbs to raise kids was in.

With the dance audience gone, the big bands (which were ferociously expensive to run) could not support themselves. Many of them disbanded or scaled back in '46. The vaccuum this created in the musical landscape was filled by the vocalists. They could tour much more cheaply, either by bringing along small groups or by using local pick-up bands. So by the mid 50s no one but music nerds cared who was backing Sinatra on his records, and big bands were thought of as distinctly retro.

8

Another thing that I appreciate about Sinatra is his enunciation. Every word sharp and clear and perfect.

One thing that made his acting so good (within the framework of the song) was that he wasn’t predictable. But his twists and turns always came out right. And he made it seem personal – as if he were letting you in on something.

Recently my 16 year old granddaughter’s boyfriend dropped by her house while I was there. It pleased me beyond words that she put on a Sinatra CD while they talked.

The Summer Wind is on my mind now.

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I adore Sinatra.

I have since I was a teen.

I’m 37.

My mother, OTOH, hates him. " He’s a hoodlum"

Which naturally, makes him all the more appealing to me. :slight_smile:

And he could kick Christina Aguillera and Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears’ collective pop ass in a cage match.