Sessions with Sinatra

Frank Sinatra and the Art of Recording

By Charles L. Granata

Chicago Review Press Incorporated

Copyright © 2004 Charles L. Granata
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55652-509-4

Contents

Foreword by Phil Ramone,
Introduction,
PART I THE BIG BAND YEARS, 1937-1942,
PART II THE COLUMBIA YEARS, 1943-1952,
PART III THE CAPITOL YEARS, 1953-1962,
PART IV THE REPRISE YEARS,
PART V CAPITOL REVISITED,
Afterword by Nancy Sinatra,
Appendix A Companion Recordings,
Appendix B The Basic Collection,
Appendix C Concept Albums,
Appendix D Fifty Songs That Define the Essence of Sinatra,
Acknowledgments,
Bibliography,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

The Big Band Years, 1937-1942

Beginnings

As he grew older, Frank Sinatra delighted in reminiscing about the big band era. Frequently, in the company of family and friends (especially those connected with "the business"), he would slip into the comfortable role of storyteller and talk about how much he idolized Bing Crosby and what a tough taskmaster Tommy Dorsey was. His unprompted conversation showed that those formative years created fond memories, and his recollections of the period were vivid and full of sentiment. There is little doubt that much of the insight that guided Frank Sinatra over the course of half a century as a musician was based on the practical knowledge he'd gained during his tenure as the featured band vocalist with both Harry James (1939), and Tommy Dorsey (1940-1942).

It was during these years that he befriended many of the talented songwriters, arrangers, and musicians who would weave their way into the fabric of his musical existence, including arranger Axel Stordahl and lyricist Sammy Cahn. He took quickly to songwriters, and it was clear practically from the beginning that he possessed a discriminating taste for top-quality songs and a knack for selecting only those tunes that he instinctively knew fit his style.

His perceptive use of the microphone was born of this era, as was his understanding that a good measure of his craft was his ability to act. When singing, he could manipulate and control his body language to suit the setting of the lyric, which could evoke a certain response from his listening audience.

Much of the singer's musical wisdom stemmed from the day-in, day-out trials and tribulations of a rising band singer. As far back as the early 1940s, Sinatra was crediting Tommy Dorsey with providing the fundamentals that he would adapt to fit his vocal styling, carefully refining his approach to develop a distinct method of phrasing that would become unmistakably his own.

A sharp observer, Frank Sinatra was among the first to realize that the vocalist was quickly supplanting the orchestra as the main attraction in pop music and that he could easily apply his talents to capitalize on the trend. While his arrival signaled the beginning of the end of the big bands, Sinatra was responsible for rescuing the finest components of the swing style, creating a sensational new sound: one that depended on the vocalist to function as the heart of the performance.

While most biographical accounts cite Sinatra's time with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey as being his first real "band" experience, his big band days had really begun much earlier than his first Brunswick recording session, held in New York City on July 13, 1939. While the Brunswick date would be his inaugural commercial recording session, it was not his initial foray into a recording studio.

After a stint with a Major Bowes' Amateur Hour touring unit in 1935 (as one of the Hoboken Four, a pickup group assembled by Bowes), he fronted a small jazz combo called The Four Sharps. The single extant performance by the group, a Dixieland version of "Exactly Like You," is a Fred Allen Show radio aircheck, from May 12, 1937. While Sinatra didn't vocalize with the trio, he continued to kick around Bergen and Hudson counties in New Jersey, where he eventually befriended a young musician named Frank Mane, an alto saxophonist doing freelance solo work wherever he could find it.

Initially, Mane and Sinatra crossed paths at WAAT, a small radio station that sometimes featured live performances broadcast from its studios in Jersey City. Often, after scrounging around the station for work, Sinatra would bum rides from the saxophonist, usually to girlfriend Nancy Barbato's house on Audubon Avenue. (Frank and Nancy met during the summer of 1934; they were married in Jersey City on February 4 1939.)

Within a short time, Sinatra and Mane were frequenting Bayonne's Sicilian Club, where many musical cronies gathered to compare notes. During one of these nights out, Sinatra learned that Mane was forming a small band for the express purpose of making some recordings.

According to Mane, Sinatra visited the Sicilian Club on the eve of the scheduled recording, where he and his ten-piece band were rehearsing in a back room. Before the group disbanded, Sinatra approached him. "Mind if I come along tomorrow?" he asked. Mane assured him it would be fine, and at the appointed time on March 18, 1939, the band, plus Sinatra, reassembled at Harry Smith's Recording Studio at 2 West 46th Street in Manhattan. Among the musicians in Mane's pickup band was reed player Harry Shuckman, who would later resurface on many of Sinatra's Hollywood recording sessions for Columbia Records, and Don Rigney, a drummer who had served as best man at the Sinatras' wedding.

After three instrumentals had been recorded ("Flight of the Bumblebee"; "Eclipse," a Mane original; and "Girl of My Dreams"), Sinatra approached the sax player, who was bearing the full expense of the session, and asked whether he might record a vocal with the group. With some extra time remaining on the clock, Mane agreed and quickly brought out a stock arrangement of "Our Love," a song based on a melody from Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet.

Since Mane desired to record for purely personal reasons (he simply wanted to hear what his arrangements sounded like), and not with the intention of creating commercial discs, only one master record was made of each performance. In all likelihood, neither Frank Sinatra nor any of the other participants received a copy of the recordings they made, and Mane, a fairly modest man, never publicized the recording after Sinatra became famous. This led to a false assumption on the part of well-intentioned historians, who for many years believed that this entry in the Sinatra discography (tagged with an incorrect recording date) was a demonstration or "demo" disc that the singer had made for Nancy Barbato on the eve of their wedding. Only recently, with the "rediscovery" of Frank Mane, have the original recording discs from this session surfaced and the facts been clarified.

"Our Love," then, is Frank Sinatra's very first real recording. (The Hoboken Four performances of "Shine" and "Curse of an Aching Heart" were no more than airchecks of broadcast performances, as opposed to formal studio recordings.) This distinction aside, the song and its performance are quite unusual, as they hint at the direction the polished voice would take. Sinatra's vocal is remarkably relaxed, and fragments of the style that would develop fully in the James and Dorsey periods are readily apparent in his fluid handling of the vocal lines.

Although he didn't know it at the time, Frank Mane (who died in December 1998 at age 94) had given the man who would become one of the greatest entertainers in...