9. The Sinatra Phenomenon
by Gene Lees
JUDGING FROM the testimony of many who knew him, Tommy Dorsey was a dyed-in-the wool, 22-karat son of a bitch and probably the most implacable martinet in the band business. A superb instrumentalist himself, he would tolerate nothing but the best he hired the best, then turned the screws on them to get every last drop of performance of which they were capable. That is one reason touch stones like "Well, Get It" remain among the great instrumental classics of the era.
Yet for all Dorsey's regimentation, his band was constantly on fire, as if burning with some great inner free dom. It was a band full of brilliance and of temperament, containing as it did at least two young men whose perfectionism, sense of self, willfulness, and short temper were equal to Dorsey's own. One was the virtuoso drummer Buddy Rich, who once threw down his sticks in the middle of a theater performance and quit. (He later returned.) The other was Rich's inexorable enemy (and, eventually, close friend), Frank Sinatra. Sinatra once punched Rich while on the job and also, it was said, hurled a pitcher of water at him.
But Sinatra had more than a bad temper, which of course was why Dorsey hired him away from the fledgling Harry James band. It should be noted that James encouraged this move, since the more famous Dorsey was able to do more for the singer than he could. Sinatra has never for gotten this gesture.
Also traveling with Dorsey in those days was the Pied Pipers. Many bands carried vocal groups, and some of them were vaguely embarrassing, with their doot-doot-doo-wah irrelevancies and nasal vocal production.
But the Pied Pipers were not, partly because lead singer Jo Stafford, whose training had been operatic, had perfect intonation. Remembering those days, Stafford once told me, "Frank joined the band while we were playing a theater in Milwaukee. The Pied Pipers were--well, we thought we were pretty good, and we were a little clique. Frank was very thin, almost fragile-looking. When he stepped up to the microphone, we all smirked and looked at each other, waiting to see what he could do. The first song he did was 'Stardust.' "I know it sounds like something out of a bad movie, but it's true. Be fore he'd sung four bars, we knew he was going to be a great star." Three or four years later, when Sinatra had left Dorsey and girls were fainting (or pretending to faint) over his performances, newspapers and magazines hurried to interview sociologists and psychologists in hopes of eliciting explanations of the phenomenon. But the secret of Sinatra's success is simple: He was (and is) the best singer in the history of American popular music. He brought to the craft an unerring musicality, an analytical intelligence, and a deep dramatic instinct. One critic of the period scoffed that Sinatra sang popular songs as if he believed them. In this the man demonstrated his ignorance of how good much pop music had become, and an even deeper ignorance of the art of acting. In 1904, Lionel Barrymore wrote, in an analysis of what it takes to be a great actor, "Let the most profound, the most classic line fall from his lips, he must be unconscious of the fact that he is not the author of it." That's how Sinatra sang. He was a great vocal actor, and every line he sang sounded as if he were making it up as he went along. This gave his work a compelling intimacy and immediacy, something like the acting a few years later of Marlon Brando or, perhaps even more, the late James Dean. No other singer had ever made lyrics so credible or so touching.
His art was much more studied than anyone realized. Sinatra is on record as saying that he learned a great deal from listening to Dorsey play trombone night after night on the band stand. A report circulated during the first flush of Sinatra's success that he had learned an Indian trick of breathing in through the nose while continuing to sing. But no Indian ever achieved this physiological impossibility, and neither did Sinatra. In brass and woodwind playing, there is a rare technique (of which Clark Terry is a master) called rotary breathing. This entails filling the cheeks with air, closing the throat, and maintaining pressure on the embouchure while inhaling through the nose. Dorsey himself never mastered it. But he did have remarkable breath control, and his slow, deliberate release of air to support long and lyrical melodic lines was instructive to Sinatra. Dorsey would use this control to tie the end of one musical phrase over into the next. And Sinatra picked up the trick.
This is obvious in their 1941 recording of "Without a Song." Since the trombone solo precedes the vocal, one can observe the similarity of approach. At the end of the release, Sinatra goes up to a mezzo-forte high note on the words "as long as a song is strong in my SOUL." But he does not, as other singers would have done, breathe at that point; he drops immediately to a pianissimo and continues without interruption into: "I'll never know what makes the grass so tall.
..." This linking of phrases gave Sinatra's work an apparent seamlessness.
On that same recording (available in a reissue album, RCA ANL 1-1586) one hears another of the Sinatra de vices. The next time he sings "I'll never know," he hits an A on the word "know" before descending immediately to G, the proper note for the word. This device-a kind of appog giatura-drove the adolescent girls wild. In fact it was adapted most directly from Dorsey's trombone work. Such "bends" are easy to make on the trombone and natural to the instrument.
Sinatra's voice at that time was a pure, rather sweet tenor. A year and a half later, when he recorded "In the Blue of Evening," he had already abandoned that almost bel canto purity, and Italian gravel was audible in the voice. His singing was acquiring guts. And his concern for enunciation already was evident. Actually, it had been there from the beginning, but in earlier recordings the well-shaped vowels sound consciously produced.
By the time of "In the Blue of Evening," the vowels seem natural to him, part of his own accent. In singing, the vowels carry the sound; consonants are devices of articulation, something like tonguing or the movement of the valves in trumpet-playing. Sinatra was as meticulous about consonants as he was about vowels. His singing was notable for its unfailing clarity.
If he acquired technique from Dorsey, he acquired at least some of his ways of conceiving a song from Billie Holiday. Indeed, so did most of the best singers of his generation, including Peggy Lee-Sinatra's equivalent among women singers in interpretation. Holiday's records are some thing of a puzzle, at least to those who are not caught up in her mystique. She always gives me the impression of not quite knowing what she is doing. Musically unschooled, with a small, limited voice and a tendency to short phrases (in contrast to Sinatra's long phrases), she seems to be doing the natural thing because no one taught her the unnatural. Thus she phrased her songs not according to their musical structure, but according to the meaning of the words. Whether she did this by intent or accident, I do not know. But Sinatra did it by intent.
And something else contributed to his success: He understood the micro phone like no singer before him. In the days when popular music was heard mostly in unamplified vaudeville houses, singers of necessity were "belters." Jolson came from that era.
In the 1920s, the megaphone enabled band singers to produce a louder sound, but one that seemed to have been filtered through a box of soda crackers. When microphones came into use later in that decade, they were not very good, and singers weren't quite sure what to do with them. Some, particularly Bing Crosby, used them in a lazy and amiable way.
Sinatra was the first singer to comprehend fully the advantages (and draw backs) of the microphone. Journalists made sport of his manner of handling one, suggesting he held onto it to prop himself up. They failed to understand that he was working the mike--playing it like an instrument.
The microphone restored to singers the possibility of performing at a natural volume, rather than that necessitated by large theaters and opera houses. It did not make singing unnatural; it restored naturalness to it.
But--and this is little understood-the microphone is a treacherous instrument: It magnifies every flaw in a performance. It is difficult to use properly.
For example, the plosive consonants p and b, which pose no problem to anyone singing in an opera house or the bathtub, become booby traps to the singer working close to a mike.
The burst of air released by these consonants can rattle the elements in the mike. Therefore a singer must approach them with care. Failure to do so results in a phenomenon called "popping the mike." You hear it on records-but never on Sinatra's.
Furthermore, the proper use of a microphone in good popular singing requires a constant moving in and out-backing off on loud notes, coming closer for soft. Of course, you must know, or feel, how far to move back. If you draw back too far, room sound-a tinny distant quality-results. Yet if you are not far enough away when singing a loud note, you can force the recording tape into overload distortion. An engineer can help the singer by compression, but the resulting sound is a little unsatisfying and unnatural. Sinatra shuns compression in recording, because he doesn't need it.
Sinatra's genius as a performer and that he is a genius is virtually universally accepted within the profession--was not fully manifest until after he left the Dorsey band. With Dorsey, he had been required to sing at tempos suited to dancing. Freedom to explore a song as a dramatic miniature did not come until he made four sides for the Bluebird label, "The Song Is You," "The Lamplighter's Serenade," "Night and Day," and "The Night We Called It a Day." The arrangements by the late Axel Stordahl (who, with Paul Weston, had been a Dorsey arranger) may well be the first example of the skillful use of strings in popular music. With those four records, Sinatra became completely Sinatra. In later years, his work would mellow, deepen, and ma ture. But the conception and the method were fully developed by the time of those recordings.
From that moment on. Sinatra's success was such that the record companies rushed to get other band singers into the studio, including Billy Eckstine (dubbed, inevitably enough, "The Sepia Sinatra" by the press agents, though there was little similarity between their work) and the brilliant Sarah Vaughan, both alumni of the Earl Hines band; Jo Stafford; Doris Day from the Les Brown band; Perry Como from Ted Weems; Peggy Lee from Benny Goodman; Andy Russell from the Alvino Rey and early Stan Kenton bands; and Dick Haymes, who had followed in Sinatra's foot steps in both the James and Dorsey bands. Sinatra opened the way for all of them. And he influenced at least two generations of singers, including Vic Damone, Steve Lawrence, Matt Munro, Jack Jones, and one of the most sensitive and intelligent (and underrated) of them all, Julius LaRosa.
But in pioneering a new approach to singing, Sinatra also posed a problem. What he did seemed so indisputably right that any other approach to phrasing seemed wrong. If one phrased his way, one sounded obviously derivative. But what was the singer to do-not phrase for the meaning of the lyric? Indeed, in the era of rock that followed and largely obscured or obliterated the achievements of the band era and the postwar period-the Sinatra era, as it were-that is precisely what singers began to do. And not only do singers now phrase in ways that violate the sense of the lyric, but the lyrics themselves are often written in violation of the inflections, phrase structure, and note-groupings of the melody. Much of the post-Sinatra pop music has been notable for its lack of naturalness.
What the band-trained singers had in common was discipline. Having worked so long within the iron strictures of dance tempos, most of them had excellent timing. It took care of it self, and freed from the limiting metric patterns of the bands they were able to explore singing as an art in it self.
And their recordings became music to listen to, not music to dance to, a shift in aesthetic priorities whose con sequences could not be foreseen. It would be a contributing factor in the decline of the big bands. Ironically, the singers would help destroy the very bands that had nurtured them.
This is the subject I will consider in the next issue.
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(High Fidelity, Oct. 1977)
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