Some years ago, when Sinatra played the Point in Dublin with Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, he sang a duet with the much younger Lawrence. It was a revelation. Although Sinatra was then in his 70s, his gift for phrasing made Lawrence seem stodgy and inflexible - as if he was saying to the younger man, "listen, sonny, this is how it's really done". The voice may have been ravaged by time and excess but what Sinatra had left was beyond the reach of anything that - to quote the Immortal Bard - "age, ache, penury or imprisonment can lay on nature". He was always explicit about where this genius for phrasing came from. Billie Holiday, the great black jazz singer, was his model. And the jazz trombonist, Tommy Dorsey, the "Sentimental Gentleman" with whose band Sinatra first achieved national celebrity at the end of the 1930s, was another acknowledged influence on his phrasing, particularly his breath control.
Curiously, though, Sinatra's time was different to Lady Day's - closer to the beat, where Holiday's was so laid back it seemed to float above the rhythm. Initially, Dorsey might have been the more immediate influence but Sinatra gradually refined his handling of a lyric to grow out of his models into something unique. Whether dealing with a ballad like One For My Baby, from the classic Only The Lonely album, or a brisk swinger like You're Getting To Be A Habit With Me on the great Songs For Swingin' Lovers, both from the mid-1950s, he was clearly the benchmark against which everyone else in the idiom was to be judged.
He sometimes referred to himself as a "saloon singer". If that sounds disparaging, it nevertheless caught something essential about his style, epitomised by One For My Baby. He transformed this song of unrequited love, told to a bartender in the wee small hours, into a memorable piece of urban balladry. And he did it by acting out the lyrics, getting "inside" the words and investing them with almost palpable emotion and then singing them as if he had just made them up. It's a conversational style, intimate and personal, all the more remarkable because, in making this and other songs his own, with it he transformed them without violating their character.
At some deep level, what he did is beyond explanation. As an actor and a singer, he worked by instinct; repeated "takes" of a scene or song quickly bored him and his performance suffered as a result. But he was also very conscious of what he wanted, even early in his career. He bought himself out of his contract with Dorsey, who charged him an unsentimental $75,000 for the privilege and took charge of his own career, beginning to work with arrangers who would give him, musically, what he wanted.
This was crucial to his development as a singer. The various arrangers he worked with, especially George Siravo, Axel Stordahl, Billy May, Gordon Jenkins and, above all, Nelson Riddle, allowed him to define and refine the twin poles of his musical personality - the exuberant swinger and sensitive interpreter of ballads. Others, like Neal Hefti, Johnny Mandel, Don Costa, Sy Oliver, Quincy Jones and Robert Farnon, came later, but by then Sinatra was fixed in his maturity as an artist.
And they were collaborators. Sinatra was not one to take, unquestioningly, whatever they chose to give him. Among the first of these were George Siravo (for "swingers") and Axel Stordahl (for ballads and the like). Siravo is well represented by Swing And Dance With Frank Sinatra, a collection from 1944-1951, the later part of which was done by the singer performing to already recorded orchestral tracks; because his voice - and career - were then at a low ebb, his mike was switched off at the orchestral sessions and he was brought back, after a rest of several weeks, to complete the recording in secret - the musicians' union had outlawed the practice of using pre-recorded backing tracks.
Those sessions, done at the start of the 1950s, may well have been the first LP examples of an approach Sinatra - and his arrangers - were to bring to an early perfection. This was to use the new long-playing medium to produce albums unified by material picked to establish a mood or shape a theme.
The process peaked with Nelson Riddle at Capitol Records in the mid-1950s. Riddle was a master of both swingers and ballads and, together, he and Sinatra produced a series of albums that remain the finest in the singer's long career. Their collaborations stand as milestones in the art of popular singing, as well as a compendium of some of the best examples of the great era of American popular song - works by Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, the Gershwins, Harry Warren, Jimmy Van Heusen, Alec Wilder and Matt Dennis.
