Why Sinatra matters

[fasstrack]

Just started this in the library and it's a cinch I'll buy it. Pete Hamill understands as well as anyone the night and Sinatra's power over it and our heartstrings, and can explain in simple, crisp, and beautiful prose.

I also loved A Drinking Life. Bravo, Mr. Hamill, once more.

[Harold_Z]

Thanks for the reminder. I meant to read this when it first came out and had forgotten all about it. Hopefully this will prompt me into reading it. I'm sure I would dig it. Also meant to read A Drinking Life.

I'm gigging a lot with an excellent singer guitarist who really knows the Sinatra stuff inside out. It's great to be doing a lot of those tunes and to be doing them with the right changes (amazing how club daters masacre a lot ot those tunes). I had (and have) to shed with the records on occasion and I dig the hell out of doing that!

[Chuck Nessa]

I understand and like Sinatra - I have 10 cds and another few lps. I never thought he could swing, though he does have other qualities.

[JSngry]

Maybe I'm living wrong, but I've spent the first part of my life being old, and am now going about the task of trying not being a stranger in my own world for my remaining days. The last thing I want is to experience the present as a befuddled and/or pissed off spectator for the rest of my life. I've seen it, hell, I am seeing it, and it ain't what I want.

Yeah, Sinatra mattered, and in a lot of ways (artistic more than cultural) still does. But c'mon - if the best we can do for ourselves is to build our present on icons of the past, what are we doing to our own spirits other than enslaving them?

I've "got" Sinatra, and a shitload more of the icons, and so have a lot of us. They're in there for keeps, surrounded by the deepest love. I don't need that elucidated or reinforced. What I need to do is do something for myself. The time for reverentially kneeling down should be significantly outweighed by the time for proudly standing tall and moving ahead.

Can we just fucking move on?

Ring-a-ding-ding, ya'll.

[BruceH]

He was, as Ernist Borgnine put it, a tough little monkey.

Edited July 11, 2006 by BruceH

[fasstrack]

Maybe I'm living wrong, but I've spent the first part of my life being old, and am now going about the task of trying not being a stranger in my own world for my remaining days. The last thing I want is to experience the present as a befuddled and/or pissed off spectator for the rest of my life. I've seen it, hell, I am seeing it, and it ain't what I want.

Yeah, Sinatra mattered, and in a lot of ways (artistic more than cultural) still does. But c'mon - if the best we can do for ourselves is to build our present on icons of the past, what are we doing to our own spirits other than enslaving them?

I've "got" Sinatra, and a shitload more of the icons, and so have a lot of us. They're in there for keeps, surrounded by the deepest love. I don't need that elucidated or reinforced. What I need to do is do something for myself. The time for reverentially kneeling down should be significantly outweighed by the time for proudly standing tall and moving ahead.

Can we just fucking move on?

Ring-a-ding-ding, ya'll.

WTF? Calm down, dude. All I was doing was trying to recommend a book I'm enjoying. C'mon, man, that was uncalled for.

[fasstrack]

Thanks for the reminder. I meant to read this when it first came out and had forgotten all about it. Hopefully this will prompt me into reading it. I'm sure I would dig it. Also meant to read A Drinking Life.

I'm gigging a lot with an excellent singer guitarist who really knows the Sinatra stuff inside out. It's great to be doing a lot of those tunes and to be doing them with the right changes (amazing how club daters masacre a lot ot those tunes). I had (and have) to shed with the records on occasion and I dig the hell out of doing that!

I'd like to hear that. What do you play?

PS: That's nothing compared to the way club daters (and, sorry to say, also 'hip' jazzers) massacre Jobim. Oy vay.....

[JohnJ]

I also meant to read this when it first came out, so thanks for the reminder. Sinatra still matters a hell of a lot to me and nobody I have heard since comes close.

[Harold_Z]

Thanks for the reminder. I meant to read this when it first came out and had forgotten all about it. Hopefully this will prompt me into reading it. I'm sure I would dig it. Also meant to read A Drinking Life.

I'm gigging a lot with an excellent singer guitarist who really knows the Sinatra stuff inside out. It's great to be doing a lot of those tunes and to be doing them with the right changes (amazing how club daters masacre a lot ot those tunes). I had (and have) to shed with the records on occasion and I dig the hell out of doing that!

I'd like to hear that. What do you play?

PS: That's nothing compared to the way club daters (and, sorry to say, also 'hip' jazzers) massacre Jobim. Oy vay.....

Electric Bass.

But I swing.

Yeah..they kill Jobim too.

[AllenLowe]

well, I liked Frank, but Jilly Rizzo was the real king -

[Rooster_Ties]

I understand and like Sinatra - I have 10 cds and another few lps. I never thought he could swing, though he does have other qualities.

I think I like Sinatra all the more specifically because he really doesn't swing exactly.

Come to think of it -- of the very few jazz singers I do like (I can probably count them on one hand), almost none of them swing, or else they swing rather unconventionally. Andy Bey, Jean Carn, somebody else I'm forgetting. (I'm in Colorado this week for work, and can't check my collection for others -- but that may be close to the full extent of the jazz singers I own.)

I've never thought of Sinatra as being particularly a "jazz singer" for some reason. He sings with jazz, sure, but he's not at all what I think of when I think of "jazz singers".

Edited July 11, 2006 by Rooster_Ties

[JSngry]

Maybe I'm living wrong, but I've spent the first part of my life being old, and am now going about the task of trying not being a stranger in my own world for my remaining days. The last thing I want is to experience the present as a befuddled and/or pissed off spectator for the rest of my life. I've seen it, hell, I am seeing it, and it ain't what I want.

Yeah, Sinatra mattered, and in a lot of ways (artistic more than cultural) still does. But c'mon - if the best we can do for ourselves is to build our present on icons of the past, what are we doing to our own spirits other than enslaving them?

I've "got" Sinatra, and a shitload more of the icons, and so have a lot of us. They're in there for keeps, surrounded by the deepest love. I don't need that elucidated or reinforced. What I need to do is do something for myself. The time for reverentially kneeling down should be significantly outweighed by the time for proudly standing tall and moving ahead.

Can we just fucking move on?

Ring-a-ding-ding, ya'll.

WTF? Calm down, dude. All I was doing was trying to recommend a book I'm enjoying. C'mon, man, that was uncalled for.

I've read it, and yeah, it's a very good book.

No dis of you or the book intended. Sorry if it came across as such.

It's just that I'm not particularly looking forward to spending my remaining years where I've spent my previous ones, and the whole Sinatra-fetishism that is rampant across the land by people who should know better (and many, especially among the young, who should but apparently don't) is an impediment to that. The guy was one helluva singer (especially on ballads), but when you got kids wanting to play "I've Got You Under My Skin" and stuff and expecting you to be excited about it, like you've never played/heard it before, well hey - sorry. Can't do that. Won't do that. Especially when there is style without substance. And I've yet to hear anybody under the age of 40 who even begins to appreciate the substance, much less deal with it. The guy was a singer, dammit, and a damn good one at that, and that's why he really matters today. But who gives a shit about that anymore? Cats just want to do the "Rat Pack" thing as an alternative alternative, if you know what I eman. Sorry, but I gotta say fuck that. And then the old folks think that they're cool again because "the kids" are digging what they dig. Uh...no. Two wrongs don't make a right, even if three lefts do...

I can only take a "Sinatra fan" seriously if they're willing to just entertain the notion that Songs For Swinging Lovers is a damn good pop album of great sociological significance and immense musical pleasure, but Only The Lonely is a freakin' timeless masterpiece that plumbs the depths of a certain timeless element of the human condition. One's "hip", and the other's heavy.

Can't say that I've ran into too many people willing to entertain that notion. Everybody wants "ring-a-ding-ding", it seems. But that shit really doesn't matter now, except as a necrophiiliac response to today's realities. Probably shouldn't have mattered then either, at least not as much as it did, but what's done is done.

Or, it seems, not.

It was against that fetishism, not Sinatra, nor the book, nor you, that I was venting. Love the art, got no use for the cult.

[JSngry]

I understand and like Sinatra - I have 10 cds and another few lps. I never thought he could swing, though he does have other qualities.

I think I like Sinatra all the more specifically because he really doesn't swing exactly.

No, he never really did "swing".

What he could do (and did do more & more as he aged), was to find the pocket of a swing groove, get down deep into it, and ride the shit out of it. He didn't get outside that pocket without sounding anywhere from awkward to downright corny, but when he was in that pocket, he was dangerous. He could, and did, push a good beat almost to the breaking point like very few, if any, others. I saw him at Caesar's in 1981, and he did that shit all damn night, much to my then-naive amazement. It was palpably intense.

But I still think his real artistry was on the ballads.

[AllenLowe]

I think Sinatra could swing as long as he wasn't really trying to - meaning, on performances where he was trying to be "jazzy" he tended to sound just the opposite - but hear him just sing without pretence and he has his own definition of swing - great time, phrasing - another way of doing it -

Edited July 11, 2006 by AllenLowe

[MartyJazz]

I think Sinatra could swing as long as he wasn't really trying to - meaning, on performances where he was trying to be "jazzy" he tended to sound just the opposite - but hear him just sing without pretence and he has his own definition of swing - great time, phrasing - another way of doing it -

Great observation, I fully agree.

[JSngry]

I think Sinatra could swing as long as he wasn't really trying to - meaning, on performances where he was trying to be "jazzy" he tended to sound just the opposite - but hear him just sing without pretence and he has his own definition of swing - great time, phrasing - another way of doing it -

i'll agree with all of that, which is why I said he never really did "swing". He did have his own way of doing it, and it was very tied to the beat, which is usually the antithesis of "swing", at least in the "modern" sense of finding the cracks in the basic pulse and bouncing off and around them naturally & effortlessly. In those terms, I prefer to think of him as "driving" rahter than "swinging", but really, that's probably just semantics.

But I still think that his real artistry was on the ballads.

[ghost of miles]

I can only take a "Sinatra fan" seriously if they're willing to just entertain the notion that Songs For Swinging Lovers is a damn good pop album of great sociological significance and immense musical pleasure, but Only The Lonely is a freakin' timeless masterpiece that plumbs the depths of a certain timeless element of the human condition. One's "hip", and the other's heavy.

Can't say that I've ran into too many people willing to entertain that notion. Everybody wants "ring-a-ding-ding", it seems.

Ironically enough, I was just talking about Sinatra to a friend of mine a couple of days ago, and that's basically what we said. I can't stand the swingin' Rat Pack Vegas stuff... kinda dig COME FLY WITH ME, but a little of it goes a long way. ONLY THE LONELY and IN THE WEE SMALL HOURS are the two albums I go back to the most, along with the ballads from the Columbia era. And Chaney hipped me to the fantastic small-group jazz sides that FS did for his radio show circa 1953-54--a real shame that he didn't record in that format more often (check out some of the boots from the sextet tour for more of it).

But yeah, I much prefer the "I'm drinking alone at 3 a.m. because I'm never getting over Ava" side of Sinatra's material. And heartbreak never gets old or goes out of style, unfortunately.

[JSngry]

ONLY THE LONELY and IN THE WEE SMALL HOURS are the two albums I go back to the most, along with the ballads from the Columbia era.

May I be so bold as to recommend Nice & Easy? Ballad artistry, true artistry, without the heartbreak.

[7/4]

Sanatra matters?

[MartyJazz]

ONLY THE LONELY and IN THE WEE SMALL HOURS are the two albums I go back to the most, along with the ballads from the Columbia era.

May I be so bold as to recommend Nice & Easy? Ballad artistry, true artistry, without the heartbreak.

Agree, although ironically the title cut really doesn't belong on this otherwise excellent ballad set. Interesting that while you much prefer the ballad Sinatra, your favorites, i.e., Only the Lonely, Nice and Easy as well as the aforementioned In the Wee....., seem to be the Nelson Riddle arranged sides, the man also most responsible for the arrangements on the best of his swinging material while at Capitol. Regarding the Gordon Jenkins ballad arrangements for Sinatra during that mid to late '50s period, do you find his heavy reliance on strings a bit too saccharine as I do, or what?

Edited July 11, 2006 by MartyJazz

[AllenLowe]

my favorite Sinatra recordings are the transcriptions with small group- piano, bass, and guitar, as I recall, don't have the CD in front of me now - he does a very slow version of "Just One of those Things, " which is very refereshing, given how jazz people always play it fast - an absolutely perfect performance - I also like his later version of "How Deep is the Ocean." With strings, very slow and still. So I'm with Jim on a lot of this, though there are plenty of rhythm tunes by him that I like -

[AllenLowe]

just found it on the internet - Bill Miller on piano, CD is called "After Hours With Bill Miller at the Piano," Sinatra with piano, bass, and drums.

[BERIGAN]

Sanatra matters?

More so than mere guitarists......

[BERIGAN]

.... And Chaney hipped me to the fantastic small-group jazz sides that FS did for his radio show circa 1953-54--a real shame that he didn't record in that format more often (check out some of the boots from the sextet tour for more of it)....

Are these on cd(s)? If so, what they called?

[fasstrack]

Guys, I never wrinkled my forehead worrying about whether the man 'swung' or not. I never had to force my foot to pat on the rhythm numbers, but whatever. His phrasing is what I'm interested in, and his genius of recognizing a song as a mini-drama. On ballads, as has been noted, he was a particular master of this art. I don't care if Only The Lonely was an exercise in self-immolation after Ava dumped him or whatever else people natter on about. The man owned those songs. We can all learn a lot from him (and Nat, Carmen, Shirley, Sylvia Syms, etc.). I know I can.

His nocturnal doings (Jim) or 'bipolar' behavior (there's a BS term of convenience if ever there was one) are not of particular interest to me (nor, for that matter, the non-musical pecidilloes of Bird, Stan Getz, Miles, etc.), except that, as I mentioned, I read "A Drinking Life" and enjoyed the hell out of it. I see the connection and enjoy Hamill's newspaperman's ear fot terse prose. He's someone else i can learn a lot from.