We're not of his generation. He's from our parents' or grandparents' generation. But Frank Sinatra, whose 100th birthday is tomorrow, is rightly being celebrated as a transcendent figure in American popular music. Starting as a bobbysoxer idol in the 1940's, through a crash of his career and personal life, to his renewal in the early 1950's with his Academy Award- winning performance in "From Here to Eternity" and signing with Capitol Records, to his later career in movies and television, Sinatra's life arc was an improbable rise and fall and rise again whose only constant was his enormous talent as a singer and performer. He was an early, active voice in the Civil Rights movement and a supporter of the Democratic Party who, in his later years, turned more conservative (and misogynist) in his political leanings. But let's not dwell on what brought him to that pass; suffice it to say he had a sense that he was betrayed by those he supported in difficult times, and that, to a man of Sinatra's sense of loyalty, was not forgivable.
In a column entitled "America's Definitive Voice," Harold Meyerson wrote the other day about the critical time in Sinatra's career after he came through the difficult personal and professional years:
The time for smooth ballads was over, finished. Sinatra now sang of loss and exultation, of deep, often primitive emotion (he had plenty of that, right on the surface) informed by experience, style and judgment (he had even more of those). The very first number he recorded with Riddle was Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler’s “I’ve Got the World on a String,” sung with a new mixture of authority and controlled abandon, elongating the soft consonants (nobody stretched the letter “N” like Sinatra), swinging the delivery with a paradoxical loose precision. “I’m back!” Sinatra exulted when the session ended. Was he ever.We could spend a month reviewing his life and career, but best to let his music speak (or sing) for itself. Here's the aforementioned first number he recorded with Nelson Riddle at Capitol, plus a few other favorites of ours from the same Capitol era. Enjoy.
