HomeFrank SinatraUnited KingdomFrank Sinatra at 100: A Look Back at the Legend's Breakthrough Album 'Songs For Swingin' Lovers' (Exclusive Book Excerpt)
When we celebrate the 100th birthday of Frank Sinatra today
(Dec. 12), we’re actually celebrating many careers and multiple
lifetimes of one amazing individual. As well as many different musical
personas: the more innocent Sinatra of the 1940s is a very different
animal than the aggressive Sinatra of the 1960s -- although there is a
continuity that runs through all of his work. Where do the dividing
lines occur? The most obvious point of demarcation is the transition
from from the young Sinatra to the more mature Sinatra, which begins
with the most celebrated "comeback" in all of American popular culture. I would argue that the new phase begins with his breakthrough 1956 album, Songs For Swingin’ Lovers.The following is an exclusive excerpt from The Fifty Greatest Jazz & Pop Vocal Albums, an in-depth look at the recorded masterworks of the Great American Songbook, coming from Pantheon Books in Spring 2017.
The received wisdom regarding said comeback is that it began in August 1953 with the release of From Here to Eternity. This
was his first hit movie in a long time and also the one that launched
his career as a "serious" dramatic actor. But symbolically, his
Oscar-winning portrayal of James Jones's "Maggio" more accurately
represents the end of the first phase of his career. Sinatra had to
literally die on screen in order to be reborn.
That rebirth began
four months later with the recording of "Young at Heart," a song about
new beginnings and fresh starts. Sinatra’s reinvention of himself was
fully realized in one of the great albums of his or any other career, Songs for Swingin' Lovers,
recorded mostly in late 1955 and released in March 1956. Just as "Young
at Heart" is a song about new beginnings and fresh starts, Songs for Swingin' Lovers starts
with Sinatra declaring "You Make Me Feel So Young," in which he
declaims loudly that there are bells to be rung and songs to be sung.
Courtesy Photo
The singer's previous project was the torch-song-infused In the Wee Small Hours, in which he confronted the personal demons of his tumultuous "nosedive" period of the early 1950s. (Both Wee Small and Swingin’ Lovers, amazingly were arranged and conducted by the greatest of all Sinatra's collaborators, the brilliant Nelson Riddle.) With Songs for Swingin' Lovers,
he was truly moving to the next phase in his life. Now that he had
purged his soul of his sins, the time was nigh to pick himself up, dust
himself off, and start all over again.
Sinatra
makes a key statement not only with his choice of the opener ("You Make
Me Feel So Young") but the closer ("How About You"), as well as the
entr'acte ("I've Got You Under My Skin" which opens Side B of the LP).
All 15 songs on the released album are standards, deriving from a 25
year span from the 1923 "Swingin' Down the Lane" to the 1947 "Old Devil
Moon."
This is the project where Riddle fully perfected his
trademark introductions: after a few spins, even a casual listener can
tell what tune is coming next just by the intros, none of which use the
actual melody of the song in question. Sinatra would outline the general
content of each arrangement to Riddle -- the tempo, the structure, the
general feeling - and the intros were one of Riddle's key areas of
creativity, and he used these introductions as connecting passages to
link fifteen separate tracks to each other and unify them into a concept
album. Conceptually, it's but a mere half-step from the 1956 Swingin' Lovers to the completely continuous Miles Ahead, a year or so later.
If
side A track one, "You Make Me Feel So Young" establishes the album's
intentions, it's the first song of side B that marks the album's high
point. Cole Porter wrote
"I've Got You Under My Skin" as a rather torrid torch song, introduced
by femme fatale Virginia Bruce in the 1936 Eleanor Powell vehicle Born to Dance; it was dark and dramatic, a light bolero and
a sibling of "Begin the Beguine." Some Latin rhythm remained in the DNA
of Riddle’s arrangement; he had been listening to "23 Degrees North
-- 82 Degrees West," an original composition by arranger-conductor Bill
Russo for Stan Kenton's orchestra. The Sinatra-Riddle "Skin" begins
almost like a 1930s dance band, with a foxtrot-y riff, primarily voiced
by a bass clarinet. Sinatra sings over that riff a way that sounds as
if he's holding back, like enormous emotion is mounting within him but
he's trying not to let it show.
Then,
following the first chorus, it must have sounded to pop music listeners
in 1956 as if all hell was breaking loose: the instrumental passage
resembles Kenton at his most chaotic. First there's a gaggle of
trombones led by soloist Milt Bernhart that that sounds like warring
rhinoceri. In a sense, Bernhart loses his cool so that Sinatra doesn’t
have to. Sinatra ends with a half chorus that illustrates his approach
to climaxes, especially with regard to dynamics: he re-enters at the
loudest point on the track and then gradually winds down for the ending,
rather than going for a big long, loud note at the end, as say, Judy Garland might do.
To understand why Swingin' Lovers was
so amazingly influential in its day and why sixty years later it’s
still revered as a milestone accomplishment, we have to start with the
title. "Swinging Lovers" was not just a catchy turn of a phrase: Sinatra
meant it literally. As a concept, it would signify a major breakthrough
in the evolving art of interpreting the American songbook. Up until
this point, in pop music in general, "swinging" and "lovers" were two
separate concepts. Jazz meant uptempo, riff numbers, which, when they
had words at all, tended to celebrate nonsense -- things like "A-Tisket,
A-Tasket," "Sing! Sing! Sing!" or "Hit That Jive, Jack!" Many of these
were direct descendants of Gershwin's archetypical rhythm song, "I Got
Rhythm," which formed the template (both harmonically and
philosophically) for hundreds of so-named "rhythm songs" throughout the
swing era.
Jazz musicians, following the lead of Louis Armstrong,
one of Sinatra's personal heroes, had already proven it was possible to
take a song that started life as a romantic ballad and jazz it up. But
in doing so, they were changing a number from a love song to a rhythm
song; they made it swing, but the romantic elements were neutered in the
process. With Swingin' Lovers, Sinatra announced that it was possible to do both.
By
adding a beat to a great love song, he proved that it could be erotic
and rhythmic, that the two could enhance each other. The beat made the
lyrics more passionate, and the romance made the beat more compelling
-- he showed that the heart is an instrument of rhythm as well as
emotion. He proved that the human heart could beat in solid four
swing-time.
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