Nothing but Sinatra

BY JOSEPH PLANTA

Monday, 26 May 2008

VANCOUVER – A while back, I'd gotten a request on Facebook to add someone as a friend whose name wasn’t immediately familiar. I enquired as to how we knew one another, and I was pleased to learn I’d gone to elementary school with them. They’d remembered me as someone who was an obsessed Frank Sinatra fan way back when.

It’s been ten years this month that Frank Sinatra died. He’d been far from active at his death, but his stature as a celebrity, singer, actor, personality has been secure for several decades. He was an idol of mine, one who was great to listen to and someone to emulate. Many have tried to cop Sinatra mannerisms, whether in speech, alcohol consumption, or dress. Bill Zehme helped congeal the quintessential idea of Sinatra’s lifestyle with his definitive book, The Way You Wear Your Hat: Frank Sinatra and the Lost Art of Livin’, as did the brilliant Why Sinatra Matters by the legendary Pete Hamill. And before these two books, the Gay Talese profile in Esquire, ‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold, ranks as not only one of the greatest profiles of Sinatra, capturing Sinatra in his salad days, but a shining example of ‘New Journalism’ at its finest.

Since Sinatra’s death we’ve seen the rise of Michael Bublé, a truly charismatic personality in his own right, who at the fore of his career was helped by appropriating some of the Sinatra persona, including using outright a number of Sinatra musical arrangements. Since Sinatra’s death, his legend has increased into mythological status. Stories about meeting Sinatra, or being in his presence as it seems to be regarded as, are seemingly welcome fodder on television talk shows of today. Comics like Tom Dreesen or Don Rickles can’t end their appearances with David Letterman without dropping a Sinatra anecdote, and the wonderful Martin Short can’t leave without doing a musical performance where the mimicking of Sinatra’s vocalisation is apparent and infectious.

The United States Postal Service has just issued a commemorative stamp, and Turner Classic Movies, the remarkable home of movies to the delight of many a film buff has marked the ten year anniversary of the death of Sinatra with a month long retrospective of Sinatra the actor, as they’ve unspooled many films from the Sinatra filmography. That Sinatra was a remarkable film actor is of no surprise, as he won the Academy Award for his performance in From Here to Eternity, and was nominated for his performance in The Man with the Golden Arm. It seems that he’s largely remembered for roles where he sang and danced with Gene Kelly, or offered a largely comedic performance on film punctuated with a Sammy Cahn-Jimmy Van Heusen song.

Also out this month is a new collection of Sinatra favourites entitled ‘Nothing But the Best,’ all newly remastered. An album of 22 Sinatra records that come from his Reprise (the label he founded in 1960) years features Sinatra at his arguably most recognisable. (Some will count Sinatra most memorable in those Capitol records he made in the 1950s, with songs like “Young at Heart” or “Love and Marriage.”) Sinatra in the Reprise years is more mature, perhaps not as pleasantly musical like in his big band days in the 1940s, but he’s confident with “The Best is Yet to Come,” backed by Count Basie (I swear that you can hear Sinatra smile at the start of this record.) He’s also brash and breezy with “Summer Wind,” which you seem to hear all over the place, as well as moody and pensive with “It Was A Very Good Year,” “Drinking Again,” and “All My Tomorrows.” Sinatra reportedly loathed “Strangers in the Night,” and “My Way,” but they’re on this album, probably because they’re amongst the most memorable and legendary of the Sinatra discography. And “New York, New York” is on here too, well because his rendition is as the title of the collection suggests, one of the best.

The 22nd track on this album is a previously unissued record of “Body and Soul.” The vocal was recorded by Sinatra in 1984, and a new orchestra track was laid with it this fall, thus giving us a sort of new Sinatra record to enjoy. The record is interesting, but it’s hardly a future Sinatra classic. The rest of the collection, as another critic has already written, would be good for that music fan who has yet to own a Frank Sinatra CD.

For me, Frank Sinatra long ceased to be an idol even before his death ten years ago. I became a fan, who seemed to know a great deal about his life, at least more than the average person. But the music remains deeply ingrained in the soundtrack of my memory, as well as my CD and mp3 collection. Other singers have come and go, in Sinatra’s lifetime and mine, but he remains a vital part of my life, if only that his tremendous body of work suggests constantly new avenues with which to express, adjust, emote, and evoke the emotions in me that only music can affect.

In this new collection, ‘Nothing But the Best,’ Sinatra’s own life as an artist is charted in the chronological placement of the tracks. From those cocky, brassy days in the early ‘60s to the confident, swaggering crooner who’s been bruised by love and Jack Daniels in the ‘70s and ‘80s. A portrait of Sinatra emerges and is charted, and it is that of a man going from being the premier singer of his time to that incandescent moment when the man becomes a legend for all time.

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Nothing But the Best

Click to buy this album from Amazon.ca: Nothing But the Best

An archive of Joseph Planta's previous columns can be found by clicking HERE.