The Best American Poetry

Two Songs, Different Eras: Discuss. [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Advice to Writers: Read Reviews at Your Risk

But I've been lucky this week. . .  DL

<<<
David Lehman’s “Sinatra’s Century” is a much shorter but more intimate portrait [than James Kaplan's biography]. Many of the same anecdotes used by Kaplan can be found here, too, but Lehman, an established poet, widens the frame of reference, thereby expanding the emotional resonance of the songs. He compares Sinatra’s version of “One for My Baby” to both Humphrey Bogart in “Casablanca” and to Ernest Hemingway’s famous story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” Whereas Kaplan accumulates facts, Lehman tells us what those facts mean. For example:

“There are two reasons that male resistance to Sinatra turned completely around. . . . His voice deepened . . . and he was able to sing so convincingly of loss, failure, and despair unto death.” But when a fact is needed, Lehman comes through: In a 2014 commercial for Jack Daniels, a voiceover tells us what Sinatra’s recipe was: “three rocks, two fingers, and a splash.”

There it is, a Sinatra haiku, and, boy, what a splash he made.
>>>

-- Sibbie O’Sullivan is a writer on the arts who lives in Wheaton.
(from the review in the Washington Post, October 28, 2015)

l

<<<
Mr. Lehman appears to have listened to cuts from each of Sinatra’s nearly 600 recording sessions, watched most of his 50-odd movies and his countless TV shows and specials, and read deeply in the bibliography. A fan, Mr. Lehman pronounces Sinatra “the greatest of all popular American singers,” his work “an aesthetic experience of intense pleasure,” and the star no less than “the most interesting man in the world.” He compares Sinatra’s 1958 recording of the Harold Arlen-Johnny Mercer lament “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)” to Hemingway’s pitch-perfect story “A Clean Well-Lighted Place,” about a forlorn, tipsy old man reluctant to leave a Madrid cafe. Sinatra’s ballad, Hemingway’s nihilistic tale and the sight of Humphrey Bogart stood up in the rain by Ingrid Bergman at the Gare de Lyon in “Casablanca,” he writes, are “what American existentialism, as a mood or an aesthetic condition, is all about.”

Happily, most of Mr. Lehman’s Sinatra appreciation is on a less cerebral plane. He ticks all the familiar biographical boxes: mother-ridden boyhood in Hoboken, N.J., bobby-sox mania, career eclipse, Ava Gardner, movie stardom, Rat Pack shenanigans, mob and Kennedy connections, master of sex, sad decline. But, like a good rewrite man, Mr. Lehman holds the reader by ferreting out of the voluminous files lots of choice quotes and anecdotes that reanimate Sinatra’s gamy lost world.

Here is Ava Gardner proclaiming, “He weighs 120, but 110 of those pounds are pure c—k.” Here is movie mogul Louis B. Mayer sobbing as he watches young Sinatra belt out “Ol’ Man River” in 1943 at the Hollywood Bowl. And there’s Sinatra’s first glimpse of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis’s smash comedy act: “The Dago’s lousy, but the little Jew is great!” Or screaming in a Hollywood restaurant at Mario Puzo, the author of “The Godfather,” with its portrayal of a mobbed-up crooner many thought was based on Sinatra: “Choke. Go ahead and choke, you pimp.” In his final days, Sinatra watches the 1955 movie version of “Guys and Dolls,” in which Marlon Brando got the role he coveted of the suave gambler Sky Masterson, and complains to his daughter, “He still can’t sing.” Like a pharaoh, he is buried with provisions for the next world: a flask of Jack Daniel’s.
>>>

-- Edward Kosner.  Mr. Kosner is the former editor of Newsweek, New York, Esquire and the New York Daily News and the author of a memoir, It’s News to Me. 
from the review in the Wall Street Journal
http://www.wsj.com/articles/getting-under-his-skin-1446236562

<<<

Sheckey Greene always used to like telling his Las Vegas lounge audiences about the time Frank Sinatra saved his life. Here’s how poet David Lehman quotes him in “Sinatra’s Century.” Sheckey was “standing out in front of Caesar’s Palace one night and three big tough guys began to kick the hell out of me. They were giving me a terrible beating but finally Frank came up and said ‘okay, that’s enough.’ ”
....

No one is ever likely more trustworthy about Sinatra than Kaplan has now been in his behemoth two-volume biography.

I must confess, nevertheless, that poet and anthologist David Lehman’s “Sinatra’s Century” is more to my liking because his 100 glowing and gleaming fragments on Sinatra’s life and meaning are filled with wildly entertaining quotation, anecdote and insightful critical judgment.

>>>
-- Jeff Simon, The Buffalo News (October 25, 2015)

from the archive; first posted December 2015

What does Sinatra stand for? (on his birthday)

On Sinatra's birthday: from a review in 2015
https://www.thefranksinatra.com/books/sinatras-century-david-lehman-book

<<<  Sinatra’s Century is a recently published book, written by David Lehman. The full title of the book is: “Sinatra’s Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World”. As you know, this year marks the 100th birthday of the legendary singer Frank Sinatra. The importance of this year brings many new books, events, products and unreleased music to us, and Sinatra’s Century is one of the additions to remember his legacy.

Sinatra’s Century consists of 100 notes, and the book is about 290 pages long. These are very short notes, each with its own theme. A typical note is 3-4 pages long and can be about Sinatra’s birth, his big band years, Ava Gardner, Rat Pack, Bing Crosby, Kennedy, Frank Sinatra’s death, movie career, Marilyn Monroe, mafia connections, saloon songs, David Lehman’s opinions, or anything else. The topics cover almost anything you may want to learn about Frank Sinatra, and are shortly kept with the most important parts. The notes also include many quotes of Frank Sinatra or people who knew Frank Sinatra. For the most part, these quotes are very interesting and sometimes quite funny.

Having described Sinatra’s Century and what it is about, I will now move to my personal opinions. The book is a good read. Sinatra’s life is distributed to 100 chapters quite fairly, so you get a taste of everything. And most importantly, you don’t get a chance to get bored thanks to the dynamic structure of the content. Different content at every chapter and the shortness of the chapters keeps you fresh and your interest high; and you don’t get tired while reading since every line doesn’t have factual information that you have to keep in mind.

A “personal” book on Frank Sinatra is a bold move. The trend among Sinatra books is that if you are from the Sinatra family, you write a memoir, and if you are not, you write a well structured, informative biography. Sinatra’s Century is a combination of both. It gives you biographical information about Frank Sinatra, but with a personal touch and feeling. Like “Why Sinatra Matters”, but more extensive.

In one chapter, David Lehman talks about how Frank Sinatra changes the lyrics and I really like that observation. I had made a list for “The Lady Is A Tramp” 3 years ago, and was glad to find similar content in the book. I liked that he devoted 1 of the 100 chapters to it, as it is definitely worth mentioning, but mostly ignored by many book writers. I think one reason for that is that most book writers don’t really dive into live performances of Frank Sinatra, and stick to the studio recordings instead.

Here is one paragraph from Sinatra’s Century to show what David Lehman thinks of Frank Sinatra:

“What does Sinatra stand for? Above all, genius as a singer and performer. He had the ability to give a song its definitive exposition, even to make it seem like an extension of his own personality and experience. Excellence of phrasing is the consensus regarding his spot-on musical timing. His respect for the meaning of a lyric is matched by his intuitive grasp of the melodic and harmonic possiblities.” (Sinatra’s Century by David Lehman)

When a poet with a good vocabulary explains Frank Sinatra, the result is highly satisfactory.>>>

Deems Taylor introduces Frank Sinatra on V-Disc "for the men overseas" (1944)

Sinatra at the Stork Club, 1944

"If You Are But a Dream"
"Sunday, Monday and Always"  as "Dick Haymes, Dick Todd and Como." 
     "Why should it get their goat, each time I bend a note, Dick Haymes, Dick Todd and Como?"
     "The fact that girlies scream they say will bring me grief / but if they ever stop I'll find that I'm back on relief"
     "Every time I sing, I'm compared with Bing, by Dick Haymes, Dick Todd, and Como?"
"Brahms's Lullaby"

Let's Talk Turkey

"Won't somebody tell me where's my Bess?" (Sinatra at the Waldorf, 1945)

Recorded for Columbia February 2, 1946.
Sang at the Waldorf-Astoria's Wedgwood Room, 1945.

<<<
Sinatra Takes Over Wedgewood Room and Wins Crowd Despite His Illness

The quality of laryngitis is strained these nights at the Waldorf-Astoria's Wedgwood Room where Frank Sinatra is making a belated start on a short engagement. It is painfully obvious that he shouldn't be singing until he has had proper rest yet he sang 14 numbers Wednesday night, the concluding one "Old Man River."

Ordinarily the slim technician of modern song-phrasing is in his element with a large band behind him-wasn't he once a swing band vocalist? And Dick Stable's 22-piece band, featuring numerous violins and a harp, lends splendid support, but the voice that has hypnotized millions was like a butterfly in a whirlpool.

It was a masterful performance, nevertheless. .  .

*

After rendering "My Romance," from the still-remembered "Jumbo," and "When I Marry Sweet Lorraine," he pulled the first surprise of the evening with "Bess, Where Is My Bess." A haunting, lovely tune, he sanit very well. >> f
rom Tips on Tables, by Robert W. Dana, Nov. 30, 1945. 

"Epiphany" [by David Lehman]

The announcer for the opposition
is so one-sided in his commentary
so unabashedly partisan
that I dash off a pissed-off post
likening him to the Yankees’s Phil Rizzuto
but without Phil’s endearing traits
that made him perfect for the role
of Private Maggio in From Here to Eternity.
But I do not post the pissed-off post
when I learn the guy went through
an infernal medical ordeal.
Instead, I decide to develop the conceit
that Frank Sinatra played shortstop
for the World Champion Yankees.

from the Harvard Review (Published on October 28, 2022) See, too: https://harvardreview.org/content/the-end/

Happy birthday, Stacey!

"So laugh and sing, make love the thing, / Be happy while you may. / There's always one, beneath the sun / Who's bound to make you feel that way. / The moon is shining, and that's a good sign, / Cling to me closer and say you'll be mine. / Remember, darling, we won't see it shine / A hundred years from today." [Song: "A Hundred Years from Today"; photo credit: Star Black (c) 2011]

 

Deems Taylor introduces Frank Sinatra on V-Disc "for the men overseas" (1944)

Sinatra at the Stork Club, 1944

"If You Are But a Dream"
"Sunday, Monday and Always"  as "Dick Haymes, Dick Todd and Como." 
     "Why should it get their goat, each time I bend a note, Dick Haymes, Dick Todd and Como?"
     "The fact that girlies scream they say will bring me grief / but if they ever stop I'll find that I'm back on relief"
     "Every time I sing, I'm compared with Bing, by Dick Haymes, Dick Todd, and Como?"
Brahms's Lullaby

Splash, splash [by Mitch Sisskind]

When I told Joe about how Sam Giancana

Punched Sammy Davis Jr. in the stomach

At Frank Sinatra's house Joe looked at me

And said, "I am like a frog that's been sitting

"Quietly on a lily pad until splash, splash,

"It jumps back into the water not because

"It wants to but because it must or else

"Everything will go right straight to hell.

"Sam Giancana hasn't been the same

"Since 1954 when Angeline passed on.

"She was an angel. Hey, I'd like to punch

"All of them in the stomach, Giancana,

"Sinatra, Joey Bishop, Peter Lawford,

"Not Dean Martin though. He's fabulous."

Happy birthday, Dean Martin

"I couldn't feel any better or I'd be sick
Tell me quick ain't love a kick in the head. . ."

Ils ont entendu le vent dans les arbres . . .

Thanks to Jim Cummins for sending this along. Believed to be the only time Johnny Carson sang in public:

Thanks, Jim!   -- sdh

On Nelson Riddle [by Terry Teachout, 1956-2022]

Two excerpts from "The Man Who (Re)made Sinatra: The Riddle of Nelson" by Terry Teachout (February 6, 1956 - January 13, 2022) in Commentary (July / August 2021)

<<
Nelson Riddle was, perhaps, the greatest of all the arrangers who worked on the Great American Songbook, primarily because of the work he did in the 1950s with Frank Sinatra. The two men were brought together by Capitol Records in 1953 in the hope of updating Sinatra’s singing style, which still recalled his youthful crooning of sentimental ballads. Within a matter of years, Sinatra had recorded his two finest albums, Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! (1956) and Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely (1958), on which he emerged decisively as a mature artist, in part because of Riddle’s sympathetic backing. Riddle also wrote arrangements of like quality for Rosemary Clooney, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Antônio Carlos Jobim, Peggy Lee, and Dean Martin. Riddle’s innovative work defined the predominant postwar style of arranging, which may be the defining sound of the American century. Such an artistic force is deserving of a first-class full-length biography. Alas, Peter Levinson’s September in the Rain (2001), though full of illuminating detail about his life, is musically uninformed, while Geoffrey Littlefield’s newly published Nelson Riddle: Music with a Heartbeat, nominally co-written with Riddle’s son Christopher, is a vanity-press disaster, besmirched by factual errors and even more musically ignorant than Levinson’s book. Still, September in the Rain does let us see how Riddle developed as an artist, in the process enriching our understanding of the life of the chronically melancholy man and his uncomfortable relationship with the greatest popular singer of the 20th century.
>>>

<<< Today, Riddle’s style, especially as documented in the albums he recorded with Sinatra, is universally acknowledged as the high-water mark of postwar vocal arranging. Their making was a nerve-racking process for Riddle, who confessed to finding Sinatra terrifyingly mercurial: “Frank contributed a lot to the orchestral part of his own records, just by leveling a hostile stare at the musicians, with those magnetic blue eyes! The point of this action was to make me, or any other conductor, feel at that exact moment as if he had two left feet, three ears, and one eye.”

But the resulting tension, he admitted, was “a positive factor that found its way into the record,” and it brought out the best in Riddle. More than a half-century later, their albums sound as vital as ever—and his ability to overcome his fear of Sinatra and rise to the occasion is a large part of what has kept them so. >>>

For the entire article, click here. For the record, many Frankophiles consider "In the Wee Small Hoirs" an even better album of ballads than the great "Only the Lonely." Teachout is absolutely correct when he says that song arrangers are underpaid, underappreciated, and sometimes unacknowledged. Other Sinatra arrangers worth more than a mention include Billy May, George Siravo, Gordon Jenkins, Don Costa, Axel Stordahl, Quincy Jones, Neil Hefti, and Johnny Mandel. >>>

 

Two excerpts from "The Man Who (Re)made Sinatra: The Riddle of Nelson" by Terry Teachout (February 6, 1956 - January 13, 2022) in Commentary (July / August 2021)

<<
Nelson Riddle was, perhaps, the greatest of all the arrangers who worked on the Great American Songbook, primarily because of the work he did in the 1950s with Frank Sinatra. The two men were brought together by Capitol Records in 1953 in the hope of updating Sinatra’s singing style, which still recalled his youthful crooning of sentimental ballads. Within a matter of years, Sinatra had recorded his two finest albums, Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! (1956) and Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely (1958), on which he emerged decisively as a mature artist, in part because of Riddle’s sympathetic backing. Riddle also wrote arrangements of like quality for Rosemary Clooney, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Antônio Carlos Jobim, Peggy Lee, and Dean Martin. Riddle’s innovative work defined the predominant postwar style of arranging, which may be the defining sound of the American century. Such an artistic force is deserving of a first-class full-length biography. Alas, Peter Levinson’s September in the Rain (2001), though full of illuminating detail about his life, is musically uninformed, while Geoffrey Littlefield’s newly published Nelson Riddle: Music with a Heartbeat, nominally co-written with Riddle’s son Christopher, is a vanity-press disaster, besmirched by factual errors and even more musically ignorant than Levinson’s book. Still, September in the Rain does let us see how Riddle developed as an artist, in the process enriching our understanding of the life of the chronically melancholy man and his uncomfortable relationship with the greatest popular singer of the 20th century.
>>>

<<< Today, Riddle’s style, especially as documented in the albums he recorded with Sinatra, is universally acknowledged as the high-water mark of postwar vocal arranging. Their making was a nerve-racking process for Riddle, who confessed to finding Sinatra terrifyingly mercurial: “Frank contributed a lot to the orchestral part of his own records, just by leveling a hostile stare at the musicians, with those magnetic blue eyes! The point of this action was to make me, or any other conductor, feel at that exact moment as if he had two left feet, three ears, and one eye.”

But the resulting tension, he admitted, was “a positive factor that found its way into the record,” and it brought out the best in Riddle. More than a half-century later, their albums sound as vital as ever—and his ability to overcome his fear of Sinatra and rise to the occasion is a large part of what has kept them so. >>>

For the entire article, click here. For the record, many Frankophiles consider "In the Wee Small Hoirs" an even better album of ballads than the great "Only the Lonely." Teachout is absolutely correct when he says that song arrangers are underpaid, underappreciated, and sometimes unacknowledged. Other Sinatra arrangers worth more than a mention include Billy May, George Siravo, Gordon Jenkins, Don Costa, Axel Stordahl, Quincy Jones, Neil Hefti, and Johnny Mandel. >>>

 

Frank, Fred, and Elvis

 

ELVIS PRESLEY, FRANK SINATRA and FRED ASTAIRE at Nancy Sinatra's opening night party, which was also celebrating the closing night for Elvis, at the International Hotel in Las Vegas, in 1969. Elvis's bodyguard, Joe Esposito, is in the background. "Elvis was a prince," says Mr. Abolafia. "He would give you the shirt off his back."

Photograph by Oscar Abolafia

from "A Photographer's Files" / Sidebar to "In an Era of Glitz, a Witness With Panache" by Lily Koppel

New York Times, February 10, 2008

Sinatra at the Sands, January 1966 [by David Lehman]

Ed. note: Jack Daniel's produced a limited-batch sour-mash whiskey called "Sinatra Century" to mark the singer's 100th birthday, December 12, 2015. Lehman's book Sinatra's Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World was published by HarperCollins at the same time. An editor at The Wall Street Journal noted the coincidence and commissioned Lehman, who likes good bourbon, to review the new whiskey, which came in a gift box including a thumb drive containing the recording of a Sinatra show at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas in January 1966.

1. The Background

Frank Sinatra discovered Jack Daniel’s one sleepless night in the early 1940s. “It’s been the oil to my engine ever since,” he later said. He famously praised “anything that gets you through the night, be it prayer, tranquilizers or Jack Daniel’s.” Frank always kept a bottle nearby, offstage, and he was buried with a flask of JD in his casket.

In her autobiography, Judith Campbell Exner —the moll who was mistress to both John F. Kennedy and the head of the Chicago mob—recalled a day spent with Sinatra. He “acknowledged the comings and goings of an endless string of visitors, growled at flunkies, drank martinis, ate lunch, drank Jack Daniel’s, ate hors d’oeuvres, drank Jack Daniel’s, ate dinner, and drank more Jack Daniel’s.”

By the mid-1960s, Sinatra could drink a fifth of Jack Daniel’s and still go on stage.

2) The Anticipation

Like any respectable Sinatra aficionado, I have imbibed my share of Tennessee’s trademark sour mash whiskey. And as the author of a new book on Sinatra, I had an extra incentive to try the latest ultra-premium Jack Daniel’s bottle sent to me by my editor at The Wall Street Journal: a limited-edition 100-proof whiskey aged in 100 “alligator-charred” oak barrels (so called for the scaly interior surface left by the fire, the deepest of all the chars whiskey producers use to impart flavor and color to the liquor). It hit shelves in October—in plenty of time for toasts to Frank Sinatra on his 100^th birthday, December 12, 2015.

The whiskey is called Sinatra Century. By serendipitous coincidence, my new book is called “Sinatra’s Century.” I wrote it, quite simply, because I have loved the singer’s voice, his musical savvy, his definitive versions of great standards ever since I heard “All the Way” and “Witchcraft” on the radio when I was eight or nine and grasped the essence of swing from Sinatra albums a few years later. Timing it to coincide with the centennial, I wrote the book in 100 parts, because Sinatra’s career exists in exquisite counterpoint with what Henry Luce called the “American century” and because the century is the perfect form for a subject with so many facets.

Jack Daniel’s already has a top-shelf whiskey with Sinatra’s name on it – 90 proof Sinatra Select, which is selling well, at twice the price of single-barrel bourbons that are just as good. So there was a part of me that wondered whether the same would be true with “Sinatra Century” – whether JD is selling a name, an event, and a future souvenir rather than a whiskey that can go head to head with A. H. Hirsch Reserve or the best of Buffalo Trace’s Antique Collection.

3) The Presentation

The presentation of Sinatra Century is as lavish as it should be, priced at $379 or more per one-liter bottle. It arrives in a deep blue-indigo lacquered carrying case with an engraved brass handle on top. Pop open the case, and the bottle sits in a custom groove, like a dark liquid jewel set against black velvet. Each bottle is numbered—mine is FAS 23095, the initials standing for Francis Albert Sinatra. Also in their own made-to-size grooves are a hardbound booklet devoted to Sinatra’s relationship with Jack Daniel’s and a tie clip that doubles as a thumb drive.

That last item comes loaded with a previously unreleased album of a live Sinatra performance: thirteen songs, two monologues and a coda, all recorded at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas in January 1966. Frank had just turned fifty and was teaming up with the brilliant arranger Quincy Jones backed by the Count Basie Orchestra, and what better way to return to that evening than with a rocks glass in hand?

4) The Proof

           Isn’t “proof” a lovely word? It stands in one context for the potency of a potable, and in another it means verification: a geometrical proof, say, or the proof of the pudding. Both senses come into play here. Would Sinatra Century prove potent enough to provide the perfect accompaniment to belters like “Luck Be a Lady” and “Fly Me to the Moon”? At 100 proof, it had better. (The standard “Old No. 7” Jack Daniel’s bottle clocks in at a mere 80.)

As to color, I said amber, my wife said topaz. I said tongue of flame, my wife said Stradivarius. She described the taste as “warm orange afterglow.” I took another sip and said, “Cognac.” She sipped and said, “The Cognac of bourbons.” Goes well with dark chocolate. Warms the soul “in a drear-nighted December” (to quote Keats).

The whiskey is the best I’ve ever had from Jack Daniel’s.

How to drink it? Neat or with a few ice cubes. We stuck to Sinatra’s own recipe: “three rocks, two fingers, and a splash”–a Sinatra haiku, when you think about it. We omitted the splash.

5. The Playlist

Sinatra Century promises not merely a whiskey but an experience. So you’re sitting in your favorite reclining armchair sipping and playing the recording of that Sands appearance of January 1966. It opens with a trusty icebreaker, “Come Fly with Me,” then turns to a ballad he’s sung since his crooner days, the Gershwins’ “I’ve Got a Crush on You.” Self-consciousness spoils the verse intro. The skinny singer can scarcely keep a straight face when obliged to sing “I’m your big and brave and handsome Romeo.”

He’s on safer ground with Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” Perhaps the most celebrated of all Sinatra’s up-tempo finger-snappers, it brings out his swinging best. In adapting Nelson Riddle’s 1956 arrangement, Quincy Jones makes miraculous use of reeds and muted horns to compensate for the lack of a string section.

Sinatra always maintained he was at heart a saloon singer and he proves it anew in “Street of Dreams” and Matt Dennis’s great, haunting “Angel Eyes.” As you savor another swallow, the pace changes with “Fly Me to the Moon,” a highlight of the night. Sinatra reinvented Bart Howard’s 1954 song: It wasn’t a sad wistful plea, after all, but an assertive proclamation of love. It was also a nod to NASA’s great decade, the conquest of space as a seduction song. Killer arrangement. Love that flute.

The timeless “You Make Me Feel So Young” shows Sinatra at his most buoyant, and then he turns up the warmth in Johnny Mandel’s Oscar-winning “Shadow of Your Smile.” Sinatra is dating Mia Farrow and Mia likes the song.

Frank Loesser’s “Luck Be a Lady” comes from the musical “Guys and Dolls.” In the movie version, Sinatra played Nathan Detroit, but it was Marlon Brando as Sky Masterson who got to sing this ode to gambling that marks the show’s heroic climax. Now, to correct the injustice, Sinatra demonstrates how the song should be sung. One of Sinatra’s anthems in the 1960s, a hymn to Las Vegas, here it’s as electric as “Fly Me to the Moon,” with a tail like that of “My Kind of Town.”

Time for another round.

The audience is hushed when Frank sings “It Was a Very Good Year,” where again the reeds do the work of strings, and then the Rodgers and Hart standard “Where or When,” not only a marvelous love song but also the greatest ever on the subject of déjà vu: “Some things that happen for the first time / Seem to be happening again.”

The nightclub act ends with a song Sinatra owns: “My Kind of Town,” the terrific tribute to Chicago that Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen wrote for their boss to sing in “Robin and the Seven Hoods,” his last movie musical.

By now you’ve made a dent in the bottle and you’re robustly singing along.

-- from  "Author David Lehman Takes On Jack Daniel's Sinatra Century," in The Wall Street Journal, January 5, 2016

Let it Snow X 3 [by Frank Sinatra]

 

Louis Armstrong in 1934 & in Australia c. 1956 & on the Edsel Show

"I Cover the Waterfront" .  .

Now you has jazz. . .

with Crosby  & Sinatra & Rosemary Clooney: On the Sunny Side of the Street

"More Than You Know" [by Helen Morgan, Rosemary Clooney, Ella Fitzgerald et al]

Cole Porter in "Red, Hot, and Blue":

<< I don't like Schubert's music or Schumann's,
I'm one of those humans
Who only goes in for Berlin and Vincent Youmans. >>

So here's to You, Mr. Youmans, composer of "Without a Song" and "Tea for Two," his most famous song, which he wrote at the last-minute for the show No, No, Nanette.

Terry Teachout on Nelson Riddle

Two excerpts from "The Man Who (Re)made Sinatra: The Riddle of Nelson" by Terry Techout in Commentary (July / Augusty 2021
<<
Nelson Riddle was, perhaps, the greatest of all the arrangers who worked on the Great American Songbook, primarily because of the work he did in the 1950s with Frank Sinatra. The two men were brought together by Capitol Records in 1953 in the hope of updating Sinatra’s singing style, which still recalled his youthful crooning of sentimental ballads. Within a matter of years, Sinatra had recorded his two finest albums, Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! (1956) and Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely (1958), on which he emerged decisively as a mature artist, in part because of Riddle’s sympathetic backing. Riddle also wrote arrangements of like quality for Rosemary Clooney, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Antônio Carlos Jobim, Peggy Lee, and Dean Martin. Riddle’s innovative work defined the predominant postwar style of arranging, which may be the defining sound of the American century. Such an artistic force is deserving of a first-class full-length biography. Alas, Peter Levinson’s September in the Rain (2001), though full of illuminating detail about his life, is musically uninformed, while Geoffrey Littlefield’s newly published Nelson Riddle: Music with a Heartbeat, nominally co-written with Riddle’s son Christopher, is a vanity-press disaster, besmirched by factual errors and even more musically ignorant than Levinson’s book. Still, September in the Rain does let us see how Riddle developed as an artist, in the process enriching our understanding of the life of the chronically melancholy man and his uncomfortable relationship with the greatest popular singer of the 20th century.
>>>
<<<

Today, Riddle’s style, especially as documented in the albums he recorded with Sinatra, is universally acknowledged as the high-water mark of postwar vocal arranging. Their making was a nerve-racking process for Riddle, who confessed to finding Sinatra terrifyingly mercurial: “Frank contributed a lot to the orchestral part of his own records, just by leveling a hostile stare at the musicians, with those magnetic blue eyes! The point of this action was to make me, or any other conductor, feel at that exact moment as if he had two left feet, three ears, and one eye.”

But the resulting tension, he admitted, was “a positive factor that found its way into the record,” and it brought out the best in Riddle. More than a half-century later, their albums sound as vital as ever—and his ability to overcome his fear of Sinatra and rise to the occasion is a large part of what has kept them so. >>>

For the entire article, click here. For the record, many Frankophiles consider "In the Wee Small Hoirs" an even better album of ballads than the great "Only the Lonely." Teachout is absolutely correct when he says that song arrangers are underpaid, underappreciated, and sometimes unacknowledged. Other Sinatra arrangers worth more than a mention include Billy May, George Siravo, Gordon Jenkins, Don Costa, Axel Stordahl, Quincy Jones, Neil Hefti, and Johnny Mandel.

Mark Pawlak: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

_________________________________________________________________________________

Do’s and Don’t’s

Tony Bennett said it was Frank Sinatra who told him, "Steal from one person and it's plagiarism. Steal from everybody and it's research."

 

“Keep a strict eye

on eulogistic &

dyslogistic adjectives,”

Lewis (C.S.) advised

Tynan (Kenneth).

“They shd diagnose

(not merely blame)

& distinguish

(not merely praise).”

 

“Almost any noun is better

alone than chaperoned

if it is the right noun,

and very few can stand

two adjectives” --Pound

to Parker Tyler, ‘35--

“‘Unsettled dream’

is stronger than

‘unsettled white dream’.”

 

Precision and economy of language

are virtues this author recommends

when writing poems,

but finds difficult

to put into practice.

 

“It’s more important,”

Ornette Coleman once said,

“to play the correct

feeling

than the correct note.”

 

“Some of the time,"

to quote Chuck Close,

“you know you’re cooking;

the rest of the time,

you just do it.”

 

Or as the handbook

on improvisation

for church organ advises:

"Do not be afraid

of being wrong;

just be afraid of being

uninteresting."

________________________________________________________________________________________

Mark Pawlak is the author of nine poetry collections and the editor of six anthologies. His latest book is Reconnaissance: New and Selected Poems and Poetic Journals (Hanging Loose). His work has been translated into German, Japanese, Spanish, and Polish. My Deniversity: Knowing Denise Levertov, a memoir, is forthcoming in 2021 from MadHat Press.

______________________________________________________________________________________

 

 

"Young Blue Eyes: Frankie in the Forties" [by David Lehman]

Back in January 2008, when Dwight Garner was editing the "Living with Music" blog for the New York Times, I got to write a column on my top twenty Sinatra  tracks from the 1940s, an enviable assignment and one that I had a swellegant, elegant time with. Here it is. -- DL
<<<
David Lehman’s January 2008 “Young Blue Eyes” Playlist:

Sometimes overshadowed by the Capitol Years (1953-1961) or the years after when “our hoodlum singer” (as Johnny Carson put it) became the iconic leader of the Rat Pack, the 1940s are the closest thing to a forgotten decade in Frank Sinatra’s career. This is a lovely way to spend an evening:

1) All or Nothing at All (music by Arthur Altman, words by Jack Lawrence). Though initially recorded on the day before the Nazis invaded Poland, this most famous of the songs Sinatra sang with the Harry James Orchestra is eligible here on a technicality. The 1939 recording didn’t become a hit until it was re-released as a single four years later, during a prolonged (and ruinous) musicians’ strike, when Columbia Records was desperate for material. Sinatra in 1944: “It’s a funny thing about that song. The recording we made of it five years ago is now in one of the top spots among the best sellers. But it’s the same old recording. It’s also the song I used to audition for Tommy Dorsey who signed me on the strength of it. And now it’s my first big record.” The final bar of the vocal is miraculous.

2) I’ll Never Smile Again (Ruth Lowe). As recorded on May 23, 1940, by the Dorsey orchestra with Sinatra and the Pied Pipers vocal group. Jo Stafford, then the golden female voice of the Pied Pipers, likes to say that within a few bars of first hearing Sinatra sing, she knew. You’ll hear why the first of his nicknames was “The Voice.”

3) Oh! Look At Me Now (Joe Bushkin music and John De Vries lyrics). January 6, 1941. Another gem from the three years Sinatra spent as Tommy Dorsey’s boy singer. In the allegory of Sinatra’s career, this song –– which he recorded as a solo on “A Swingin’ Affair” in 1957 –– figures heavily: “I’m so proud I’m bustin’ my vest.” Sung here as a duet with Connie Haines backed by the Pied Pipers.

) Be Careful, It’s My Heart (Irving Berlin). June 9, 1942. Like Artie Shaw, Sinatra recognized the value of recording not only current hits but a repertory of songs written by the masters, and thus he did as much as anyone to (1) extend the life of the music and (2) launch the concept of the “standard.” In this excellent Dorsey arrangement of an underrated Berlin ballad, Tommy’s trombone beautifully states the melody all the way through and then comes Sinatra’s vocal. Among other songs he recorded with the Dorsey orchestra I would name “East of the Sun (and West of the Moon”), “The One I Love Belongs to Somebody Else,” “Fools Rush In,” “How About You?” Too bad he never recorded “Our Love Affair.”

5) (There’ll be a) Hot Time in the Town of Berlin (Joe Bushkin music and John De Vries lyrics). I’ve heard two versions of this tune that Bushkin (Lee Wylie’s pianist) wrote to boost morale among the troops abroad. The CBS radio broadcast of Oct. 17, 1943, which became a V-disc, is interesting for its variant lyrics (“Michigan” rhymes with “gimme some skin”), but I prefer the more relaxed delivery of March 4, 1944 (arranged by Axel Stordahl; available on the “Frank Sinatra in Hollywood” boxed set; disc 1, number 19). This is one of “the songs that fought the war,” in John Bush Jones’s phrase. Our lads were going “to take a hike / through Hitler’s Reich / and change his Heil to whatcha-know-Joe.”

6) Dick Haymes, Dick Todd, and Como. October 23, 1944. Sammy Cahn, Sinatra’s personal lyricist, who could craft a song at a moment’s notice, took “Sunday, Monday, and Always,” the Johnny Burke and James Van Heusen hit, and wrote this about some of the competition in the continuing battle of the baritones that marked the Big Band Era. You’ll find it on Columbia’s “The V-Discs” (disc 2, number 6). “Every time I sing / I’m compared with Bing.” Jokes about how skinny he is (“They say that I need weight, / I’m just a mass of joints”) and the bobbysoxers’ adoring screams, which may yet cause him grief, “but if they ever stop / I’ll find that I’m back on relief.”

7) All the Things You Are (music Jerome Kern, lyrics Oscar Hammerstein). Recorded January 29, 1945. Axel Stordahl and orchestra. The apotheosis of the great American love song from one of America’s two greatest melodists. Concluding crescendo illustrates young crooner’s amazing range. From “The Best of the Columbia Years, 1943-1952.”

8) Where or When (music Richard Rodgers, lyrics Lorenz Hart). See comment (above) on “All the Things You Are” recorded on the same day.

9) Saturday Night (is the Loneliest night in the Week) (music Jule Styne, lyrics Sammy Cahn). Recorded February 3, 1945. Cahn and Styne turned out hit after hit for Sinatra in the mid-1940s (“Five Minutes More,” “Time After Time,” “Let it Snow, Let It Snow, Let it Snow”). Maybe more than any other song of 1945, “Saturday Night” is an instant metonymy for the home front during World War II. Superb uptempo George Siravo arrangement.

10) Put Your Dreams Away (Ruth Lowe, Paul Mann, Stephen Weiss). Recorded May 1, 1945. Sinatra’s radio and later his TV theme music. A full-throated display of his ability to sustain a note seemingly past the breaking point, a function of the breathing technique he learned from Dorsey’s trombone. This is what they played at Frank’s funeral recession.

11) Oh Bess, Where's My Bess? (George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin, Du Bose Heyward). Recorded February 24, 1946. An early example of Sinatra’s “method acting” approach to singing. The emotional identification of the singer with his material reaches operatic heights.

12) That Old Black Magic (music Harold Arlen, lyrics Johnny Mercer). Recorded March 10, 1946. Arlen, the jazziest of the songwriters, and according to Ethel Waters, the “Negro-est” white man she knew, wrote songs of extraordinary complexity. In Mercer he found his ideal lyricist: “For you’re the lover I have waited for, / The mate that fate had me created for.”

13) The Coffee Song (They’ve Got an Awful Lot of Coffee in Brazil). (Music Dick Miles, lyrics Bob Hilliard). Recorded July 24, 1946. Charming night-club number reflecting the late 1940s fascination with South America. “And when their ham and eggs need savor / Coffee ketchup gives them flavor, / Coffee pickles way outsell the dill. / Why, they put coffee in the coffee in Brazil.” Close your eyes and you’re at The Copa.

14) Begin the Beguine (Cole Porter). Oct 19, 1946. Arranged by George Siravo, responsible for Sinatra’s best charts until Nelson Riddle at Capitol. Porter liked to say that the key to writing Broadway hits was to “write Jewish music.” Listen to this amazing tropical-sounding dance number - which veers even further from the 32-bar structure than Arlen’s “That Old Black Magic” - and you’ll appreciate Richard Rodgers’s remark that the popular composer who “has written the most enduring `Jewish’ music” is Porter, “an Episcopalian millionaire who was born on a farm in Peru, Indiana.”

15) All of Me (Gerald Marks music, Seymour Simons lyrics). Arrangement by George Siravo, November 7, 1946. Sinatra recorded this number many times, most notably on the “Swing Easy” album he did with Nelson Riddle’s arrangements in 1953 or ‘54. That will remain the touchstone, but the Siravo version comes close, a sexy example of “kidding the lyrics.” The singer’s cocky confidence belies the words (“Your goodbye left me with eyes that cry”) and ends up sounding as defiant as, say, “Why Should I Cry Over You?” Of numerous alternate takes, I like best the one that ends not with the Sinatra whistle but a mutter: “You better get it while you can, baby. I’m gettin’ outta here.”

16) My Romance (Rodgers and Hart). April 25, 1947. In contrast to the fabrications of old age, Sinatra excelled at live duets during his radio years - with such as Peggy Lee, Doris Day ("Let's Take an Old-Fashioned Walk"), Eileen Barton ("Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are"), Sy Oliver and here Dinah Shore. (His duets in the 1950s with Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong and Jo Stafford are equally grand.). Criterion for judging duets: When the performers sound like they’re genuinely having fun.

17) The Song is You (Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein). Oct 26, 1947. Definitive version of great standard.

18) Body and Soul (Johnny Green music, Edward Heyman lyrics). Recorded November 9, 1947, with Bobby Hackett on trumpet. See note on track 17 above. Gary Giddins calls this the best “straight” (i.e. non-jazz) rendition of the song.

19) It All Depends on You (Buddy DeSylva, Lew Brown, Ray Henderson). Recorded July 10, 1949 with Hugo Winterhalter’s orchestra, and a fine sax solo from Wolf Taninbaum. Sinatra does a nice little be-bop scat following the bridge of this swing classic. Track five on “Swing and Dance with Frank Sinatra” is the best among many satisfactory takes. Compare to how Ruth Etting does this 1920s song –– or how Doris Day playing Ruth Etting does it in “Love Me or Leave Me.”

20) Bye Bye, Baby (music Jule Styne, lyrics Leo Robin). July 10, 1949. Swell brassy number from Jule Styne’s “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” Leo Robin’s lyric cleverly transforms goodbye to its opposite through the agency of a pun: the song begins with the title words and ends with the lovers re-united: “I know that I’ll be smiling / with my baby, by and by.” Sinatra was a natural at the finger-snapping style that he made his own increasingly in the 1950s. Compare this version with the duet of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell and male chorus in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

This list was incorporated in Sinatra's Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World by David Lehman (HarperCollins).