FROM THIS MOMENT ON
POSTED ON DECEMBER 14, 2012 BY SCOTT JOHNSON at Powerlineblog.com
I couldn’t fine the time on Wednesday to note the anniversary of the birth of Frank Sinatra on 12/12/12. William Ruhlman provides an excellent overview of Sinatra’s long career. Twin Cities disc jockey Pete Lee calls Sinatra “Saint Francis of Hoboken,” an appellation that can serve to mark his place within a musical frame of reference. Below I offer only a few notes drawn from previous posts.
“Angel Eyes” is one of the highlights of Sinatra’s classic 1958 Only the Lonely album. Sinatra’s “unusual performance” — beginning with the release instead of the first verse — “served to remind us that [composer Matt] Dennis was an unusual songwriter,” according to Alec Wilder in the last chapter of his influential American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950. Dennis had first taught his songs to Sinatra when they both worked in Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra.
It was Sinatra’s nearly three-year tenure with the Dorsey band that prepared him to launch his solo career in the fall of 1942. In his first post-Capitol recording on his own label, Sinatra paid tribute to Dorsey twenty years later in his I Remember Tommy, with arrangements by former Dorsey arranger Sy Oliver. The liner notes to the I Remember Tommy compact disc quote a 1965 Life magazine interview of Sinatra:
“How in the hell did he do it? I used to sit behind him on the bandstand and watch, trying to see him sneak a breath. But I never saw the bellows move on his back. His jacket didn’t even move. Finally, after a while, I discovered that he had a ‘sneak’ pinhole in the corner of his mouth — not an actual pinhole, but a tiny place where he was breathing. In the middle of a phrase, while the tone was still being carried through the trombone, he’d go shhh and take a quick breath and play another four bars with that breath. Why couldn’t a singer do that too?”
Sinatra obviously learned something about breathing from Dorsey, and you can hear it yourself in “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You,” the first and last tracks on the recording.
In a Wall Street Journal profile of songrwriter Jimmy Webb several years ago, Webb simply described Sinatra’s interpretive mastery: “He took possession of the material.” As for Sinatra the man, Webb said that “to me, he was an absoute gentleman. His behavior was beyond reproach.” Webb also spoke of the experience of hearing Sinatra interpret one of Webb’s own songs:
“A couple of Christmases ago I was driving along and a song came on called ‘Whatever Happened to Christmas?’ which I had almost forgotten. I sat and listened and tears came to my eyes — he and arranger Don Costa had done such a wonderful job with my song. It was an epiphany. Saying, in effect, ‘I thought highly of you.’”
In Sinatra’s Capitol albums of the ’50s, there is a mature perfection in the singing, the arrangements and the songs themselves that sets them off in the Sinatra catalogue. Among the many, many highlights of these recordings are “Old Devil Moon” (incredible!) and “At Long Last Love” from 1956′s upbeat Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! album and “From This Moment On” (the favorite recording of Sinatra aficionado Buddy Ladd) from 1957′s A Swingin’ Affair!
The video below provides Sinatra singing “I’ll Never Smile Again” with the Hi-Lo’s. The song was Sinatra’s biggest hit with Dorsey, reaching number one in 1940. On the recording Sinatra was backed by a slimmed down version of the Dorsey group called the Sentimentalists and accompanied by the Pied Pipers (including Jo Stafford). The vocal arrangement with the Hi-Lo’s closely follows the original, but Sinatra’s singing digs deeper.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kF-fczwFRI
“There was practically no band,” Stafford recalls in Will Friedwald’s Sinatra! The Song Is You. “It was very sparse. It was a very tough idea. It was hard to hold the pitch because there was so little background from the band. You really had to mind your p’s and q’s keeping it in tune.”
PS: I am a day late on Blue Eyes b-day which was 12/12/1915.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ST. FRANCIS OF HOBOKEN...
