“Sinatra did not merely interpret the American songbook. In many respects he invented it.”

 

Undated: A (early, probably) 1950s’ recording session 

By Nicholas Stix

….

“What will astonish you is—there’s no other phrase—the purity of Sinatra’s artistry. Nothing is thrown in for effect; there are no second-rate songs; he revives what was then a dated repertoire of classic material and brings it to life. It’s essential to hear what all that Gershwin and Porter and even Rodgers & Hart stuff sounds like in the original Broadway recordings to grasp what Sinatra (and the arranger, Nelson Riddle, yes, but Riddle was Sinatra’s choice) did to them. Sinatra did not merely interpret the American songbook. In many respects he invented it. Listen to the original recordings of the great Rodgers & Hart numbers and you will be amazed—and a little shocked—by how much of the thrum and vibrato and rhythmic squareness of operetta they retain. They become the songs we know when Sinatra begins to sing them. The “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” sung by Nancy Lamott and James Taylor is a masterpiece of composition—a perfect song, with a sterling idiomatic lyric and an unforgettable dark-into-light melody—but it is infinitely closer to the Sinatra version than to the square, melodramatic, prim sound of the stage original. (You can find that on YouTube, too.) And with one, so with many: Sinatra made the songbook happen. His version of Cole Porter is so free as to be—almost, not really—a new invention. That’s the mystery: he’s perfectly faithful to the songs and wonderfully free with them. (Billie Holiday, I learned later, first found this freedom, and Sinatra learned it from her, but she was forced to use almost entirely sub-standard material.) Ella Fitzgerald codified the songbook; but Sinatra intuited it first. Listen especially to “Only the Lonely,” the Schubertian album, and to “Songs for Swingin’ Lovers,” which is the scherzo one; try “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” which manages to be both tremulous and torrential, and if you’re not converted, you never will be….

At The New Yorker.