Intro to Sinatra 100 (Please pretend I posted this first)

Date
December 11, 2015

Miracler
Nick Dedina

Location
San Francisco

I'm a terrible admin
The most recent proof: Just realizing I'd neglected to lead off this whole Miracle of Miracles series with these fabulous notes from ND, the guy behind this whole special Sinatra treat. To quote Mr. Brown when he fired me from that 1982 summer job at Brown's Dairy: 'The good news is, you'll never make it as a waitress!' Now I can add project manager to the pile. Big apologies for this reckless oversight, though. This is good stuff and deserved to be the first thing shot out of the surprise cannon this week. So please pretend it was, k? Thanks, XOK.

Notes from ND
When I was a little kid they had the American bicentennial. We came back to the U.S.A. right in the middle of it – there was a freedom train and a lot of flags on bags of Wonder bread. it meant nothing to me, people.

Now, it’s The Sinatra Centennial… now, that is something to celebrate!!!!

Since you are all educated people I am sure you have some key Sinatra selections  in your collection. So, you won’t find the brilliant cuts from Wee Small Hours, Songs For Swingin’ Lovers, Come Fly With Me, Only The  Lonely, A Swingin’ Affair, Sinatra-Jobim, Where Are You, and so many others, on here. So, I envision all of you like a tuxedoed Alec Baldwin incredulously asking Tina Fey if she thinks he is a farmer. You are not farmers.

With the exception of most tracks on one collection almost all of these cuts are rarities, bootlegs and live cuts.

Why is Sinatra special?

1.   He introduced standards to popular music – Gershwin reputation was in tatters, Cole Porter was for rarified Broadway crowds, Rodgers & Hart were too sophisticated for mass audiences --  Sinatra introduced them to pop music – and collected what we now think of as The  Great American songbook. Everyone, from Louis Armstrong to Billie Holiday started recording these songs after Sinatra cut them. These became standards and jazz musicians usually interpreted these songs through Frank’s interpretations. Most of them originally sounded like light opera. He had good instincts – he improvised on harmony, changed/added lyrics, re-ordered song structure and tempos.  Composers such as Richard Rodgers and Jerome Kern hated him for the changes; others, such as Johnny Mercer, Cole Porter and Cy Coleman updated their official compositions to reflect his changes.

2.   As a newcomer, he idolized Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong but he strove to do something completely different than all of them. After Lady Day gave him her blessing, he got hipper and jazzier – he didn’t want to sound like anybody else. Take apart the peerless Lady Day and the now underrated Bing and each have more in common with King Louis than differences. Sinatra stripped everything away for a new sound and then slowly brought those things back in over time. He was a jazz vocalist not tied to the blues (something he shared with Ella Fitzgerald and very few others).

3.   He was the first male torch singer – most of his ballads were written for women. Louis and Bing were above care and strife; Frankie was in the shit.

4.   He considered himself an artist. A compromised artist but still an artist. He would do novelty tunes and act in movies but his album recordings were considered of lasting value. His collaborators were important. He was often an asshole but treated his fellow musicians and peers very well. The concept album is born, and perfected, here.

5.   Quincy Jones sums it up very nicely – there are great “music” singers and great interpreters of lyrics. Sinatra was the perfect marriage of both of those things. Check out the unreleased Rhodes keyboard version of “Sweet Lorraine” – his voice was halfway shot to hell and yet his musical instincts were still high enough to make it the best version of the song.

6.  He kept evolving. Other vocalists changed when their voices aged. Like Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Sinatra kept experimenting and evolving through his 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. The evolution of his musical style over about 20 key years is like listening to the Beatles, from start to finish, chronologically. There are five CDs in this collection…he sounds different on all of them. There are different versions of the same song that I put on these CDs for a reason: “Sweet Lorraine” to “Blue Skies” to “The Moon Is Yellow” to “Night and Day” – they keep getting turned over and redefined.

7.   He integrated his bands, the musician’s union, film sets and offices. And, not just with African American artists. Females were banned in the recording studio orchestra before Frank put Eleanor Slatkin in the first cello spot. The same goes for the bassist Ralph Peña, born in Mexico. When Billie Holiday lost her cabaret card (and ability to perform in most clubs), Sinatra publically ripped up his own card, saying the bans unfairly targeted black artists. The arranger Sy Oliver (one of the creators of the Swing Era sound) said he never had any problem getting work – he had problems getting paid fairly and getting public recognition. Sinatra paid him double and openly acknowledged his charts – turning him into a bandleader in the process.

8.  The degrees of emotional nuance in his songs are right on the money. Other people do “happy” or “sad.” Sinatra does, “this feeling of happiness makes me melancholy while this other time it made me feel on top of the world.” One song might have a subtext about being alone, another might be about being alone in a crowd. It’s the human experience, Baby!

Again, these are NOT Sinatra’s greatest recordings of songs or his key tracks, or whatever. It’s an alternative portrait of the artist's career aimed directly at an Elite Crowd (ie – you).

Cheers and Happy Sinatra 100!

(No mix for this post, but a new one's coming up later today.)