Frank Sinatra

Frank Sinatra: The Man Who Learned to Breathe

For three years Frank Sinatra stood behind Tommy Dorsey and watched him play the trombone — specifically, watched him steal air at the corner of his mouth so the musical line never audibly broke. Sinatra taught himself to do the same thing with a lyric. He never learned to read a note of music. That single piece of stolen technique is probably the most consequential thing that happened to popular singing in the twentieth century.

Hoboken

Francis Albert Sinatra was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, on 12 December 1915, weighing thirteen and a half pounds and delivered with forceps that tore his left cheek, neck and ear and perforated his eardrum for life. His baptism was postponed until April. Cystic acne in adolescence added more scarring.

His mother, Dolly Garaventa, from Genoa, was a midwife, an interpreter for her neighbours, and by every account the dominant force in the house. His father Marty, a Sicilian, was illiterate, boxed at bantamweight and rose to captain in the Hoboken Fire Department; he wanted his son to become a civil engineer. Sinatra was expelled from A. J. Demarest High School in 1931 after forty-seven days, for general rowdiness, and lasted eleven months at Drake Business School.

Dolly strong-armed a local group called the 3 Flashes into taking her son on. As the Hoboken Four they won the *Major Bowes Amateur Hour* with forty thousand votes. By 1938 he was a singing waiter at the Rustic Cabin in Englewood Cliffs for $15 a week. Harry James signed him in June 1939 at $75. His first record with James sold no more than eight thousand copies.

Dorsey's Trombone

In November 1939 he left for Tommy Dorsey at $125 a week, debuting on 26 January 1940 at the Coronado Theatre in Rockford, Illinois, with "Stardust." Dorsey became a father figure, a model of perfectionism, and a source of genuine fear: "The only two people I've ever been afraid of are my mother and Tommy Dorsey." "I'll Never Smile Again" spent twelve weeks at number one in 1940.

The apprenticeship also produced a contract entitling Dorsey to forty-three per cent of Sinatra's lifetime earnings, settled after a legal fight in August 1942. Dorsey's parting words were "I hope you fall on your ass." They never reconciled. When Sinatra cut four solo sides with Axel Stordahl arranging in January 1942, Stordahl remembered a man transfigured: "He just couldn't believe his ears. He was so excited you almost believed he had never recorded before. I think this was a turning point in his career."

Sinatramania and the Fall

His opening at the Paramount Theatre in New York on 30 December 1942 detonated. Jack Benny: "I thought the goddamned building was going to cave in." In October 1944 only 250 people left after the first show and 35,000 locked outside started the Columbus Day Riot. By 1946 he was performing forty-five times a week, singing up to a hundred songs a day, earning $93,000 a week and selling ten million records a year.

Then it collapsed completely. His publicist died in January 1950; the affair with Ava Gardner broke in February and destroyed his marriage; he haemorrhaged his throat in April and cancelled the Copa. He borrowed $200,000 from Columbia to pay back taxes. At the Chez Paree in Chicago, 150 people turned up in a 1,200-seat room, and by April 1952 he was playing the Kauai County Fair. Mitch Miller said he could not give Sinatra records away. The journalist Burt Boyar's verdict: "Sinatra had had it. From the top to the bottom in one horrible lesson."

Riddle, and the Invention of the Album

*From Here to Eternity* opened in August 1953 and won him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. In March he had signed to Capitol; on 30 April, after cutting "I've Got the World on a String" in his first session with the arranger Nelson Riddle, he said: "I'm back, baby, I'm back!"

The Capitol years are the work everything else rests on. *In the Wee Small Hours* (1955), his first twelve-inch LP, was also the first concept album — a record built as a single sustained statement in one mood rather than a bag of singles. *Songs for Swingin' Lovers!* followed in 1956, its "I've Got You Under My Skin" reportedly taking twenty-two takes. *Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely* (1958) spent 120 weeks on the chart; *Come Dance with Me!* won Album of the Year at the 1959 Grammys.

In 1960 he founded Reprise, promising artists creative control and eventual ownership of their work including publishing rights — terms unheard of at the time. He later sold it for an estimated $80 million. *September of My Years* (1965) took another Album of the Year, and the Jobim collaboration of 1967 was the year's second best-selling album, behind only *Sgt. Pepper*.

Why Frank Is Called a Genius

The claim is about interpretation, not composition, and it can be described technically. The musicologist Gunther Schuller identified exactly what Sinatra did with a song: he "would carry phrases across bar lines or phrase joinings, balancing out weak points in songs or dramatizing their best structural elements." That is a musician's description of a musician's skill. Sinatra treated the bar line as advisory. He would hold a phrase past where the arrangement said to breathe, and land it where the *sentence* ended rather than where the music did, so the lyric arrived as speech. The *Christian Science Monitor*'s appraisal after his death put the mechanism plainly: he learned it "simply by watching Dorsey's breathing as he played night after night. Breath control enabled musical control."

The professionals who worked closest to him testified to the judgement behind it. Nelson Riddle, who arranged the best of it: "It's not only that his intuitions as to tempo, phrasing, and even configuration are amazingly right, but his taste is so impeccable." Count Basie: "Frank is a perfectionist, and he believes in thorough preparation and hard work... You'll never catch him coasting." Robert Christgau called him simply "the greatest singer of the 20th century." Add to the interpretive gift one genuine formal invention — the concept album, which he made and everyone else inherited.

The counter-case is real and should not be softened. Sinatra could not read music; he learned everything by ear and depended entirely on others to notate it. He wrote none of his songs. The Capitol records are as much Nelson Riddle's and Billy May's achievement as his, and the Reprise highlights belong partly to Don Costa, Gordon Jenkins and Quincy Jones — the singer's genius is inseparable from the arrangers' craft. His own taste was not infallible: he detested "My Way," his most famous recording, believing audiences would hear it as self-aggrandisement, while *Watertown*, the most artistically ambitious record of his late career, sold thirty thousand copies. And his conduct — the Australian press tirade of 1974 among much else — has been folded into the myth rather than counted against it. He was a virtuoso interpreter and an innovator of format, not a creator of music.

Legacy

Eleven Grammys, an Academy Award, the Kennedy Center Honors in 1983, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1985, the Congressional Gold Medal in 1997, and around 150 million records sold. He wrote "You Can't Hate and be Happy" in 1959 for an anti-racist campaign after the murder of Kelso Cochrane in London, and in 1964 dedicated a youth centre in Nazareth for Arab and Jewish children. He retired in 1971 with the line "'Scuse me while I disappear," and was back within two years. He died in Los Angeles on 14 May 1998, aged eighty-two. Every singer who has since phrased a lyric like a sentence rather than a bar is working from what he took off Tommy Dorsey's trombone.

Achievements

• Emmy Award
• Golden Globe Awards
• Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award
• Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award — 1965
• Grammy Trustees Award — 1979
• Worked as television actor, film actor and actor