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Jim Emerson, Amazon.com
Sinatra already had one youthful career behind him by
the time he made Songs for Swingin' Lovers! His were no longer the
lustrous pipes of the kid crooner from Hoboken--the voice that made
bobbysoxers swoon--but from the first notes of the opening track ("You
Make Me Feel So Young") he seems to have discovered a musical fountain of
youth that fully justifies the exclamation point in the album title.
There's a buoyant new spring in his step, accented by Nelson Riddle's
lighter-than-air arrangements, that makes the Columbia records of
Sinatra's younger days sound stiff and stodgy in comparison. Even
chestnuts like "Old Devil Moon," "Pennies from Heaven," "Makin' Whoopee,"
and "Anything Goes" are rejuvenated by his vibrant touch. Put this
alongside his previous Capitol album, In the Wee Small Hours, and you have
the definitive statements by both sides of Sinatra's mature musical
personality: the lonely "saloon singer" and the swaggering, sophisticated
swinger. Sinatra's carefree confidence achieves its supreme expression in
"I've Got You Under My Skin," a performance that builds steadily to an
ecstatic climax. Cole Porter may have hated his lyrical embellishments,
but by the time the singer jauntily breaks the "fourth wall" on "Anything
Goes" ("...may I say before this records spins to a close..."), you can't
deny he's taken the title to heart.
Description
When Sinatra teams up with conductor/arranger Nelson Riddle, you know the
results are bound to swing, and swinging is what this brash, jazzy and
very upbeat album is all about. Though the Chairman has staked his claim
as the preeminent saloon singer, telling tale after tragic tale of love
gone awry, this album represents the sunny side of Sinatra. He is bold and
energetic here. His undeniably authoritative readings of songs like "I've
Got You Under My Skin" and "You Make Me Feel So Young" MAKE them into
standards, no matter who has sung them before.
Riddle's orchestrations are subtle but powerful, and SWINGIN' LOVERS finds
Sinatra's voice bouncing off punchy horn stabs and floating gently along
sweet riversof woodwinds. One of the most impressive aspects of Sinatra's
talent is his control over the tone and shape of his voice. His singing is
expansive and fluid-sounding, but it's plain that every atom of that sound
is crafted with the utmost precision. Sinatra's depth of musical
understanding makes his delivery of even light-hearted songs like
"Anything Goes" and "Makin' Whoopee" cut as deeply as his most romantic
ballad. |
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Charles Taylor, Salon.com, July 8th,
2002
"Songs for Swingin' Lovers"
Beyond the magnificent late-night gloom (and the bombast of "My Way")
you'll find Frank Sinatra's finger-poppin' classic, a joyous exploration
of rhythmic invention.
You could forget that the guy ever had a good day. After Billie Holiday,
nobody in American music has ever done more to slake our taste for
romantic masochism than Frank Sinatra. The album covers told part of the
story. "In the Wee Small Hours," with its painting of Sinatra under a
street light in the blue-green gloom of a deserted 3 a.m. city street. Or
"Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely," where a garish painting depicts
him as a tear-stained Pierrot. Or "No One Cares," where he sits staring
into his drink at a bar while all around him folks are having a good time.
The music told the rest of the tale. Taking off from the soft, dreamy
voice that the young Sinatra used on his '40s Columbia recordings, where
he was surrounded by Axel Stordahl's sensitive arrangements, Sinatra's
Capitol work, from 1953 to 1962 (when he left for his own label, Reprise),
presented that lovelorn youth transformed into a wounded, love-struck man,
deeper-voiced, older and thus with more to lose.
At their best -- the songs "In the Wee Small Hours," his mournful and
deeply strange version of Bunny Berigan's "I Can't Get Started" (in which
Berigan's light, easy-come-easy-go loser's panache was traded for a
devastated gravity), and most of all in "Cottage for Sale," a recording so
painful that there are times I can scarcely bring myself to listen to it
-- Sinatra's performances went beyond luxuriant self-pity and approached
luxuriant tragedy.
But leave us not forget the swing, the albums where Sinatra sloughed off
romantic gloom and, with the arrangements of Nelson Riddle or Billy May,
projected an upbeat winner's persona. Records like "Come Fly With Me" (or
"Come Swing With Me" and "Come Dance With Me!"), "A Swingin' Affair!"
"Nice 'n' Easy" and, most of all, "Songs for Swingin' Lovers!" stand in
contrast to Sinatra's sustained suites of magnificent mopery.
While Sinatra's '40s Columbia sides and the downbeat Capitol albums were
all about a dreamy vocal flow, these records were all about rhythm. They
are supremely playful and supremely confident. Sinatra pushes to see how
far he can go in breaking the songs down into rhythmic punctuation while
sustaining a melodic flow. Despite everything -- the anguish of losing Ava
Gardner, the attempts of then Columbia A&R chief Mitch Miller to destroy
his career by saddling him with execrable novelty tunes, a career that was
almost finished before the Oscar he won for "From Here to Eternity"
revived it -- Sinatra sang like a guy who had never been anywhere but on
top of the world. Later, that top-of-the-world confidence would be present
even in the sad songs he sang, like "The Summer Wind." (Which is why it
was a shock when he returned to his early dreamy delivery in the
underrated and nearly unknown 1967 album "Francis Albert Sinatra and
Antonio Carlos Jobim," perhaps the softest singing he ever did.)
The horror that is "My Way" (which Sarah Vowell explicated in a brilliant
essay on Sinatra, written before he died) was yet to come, but in trading
melody for rhythm Sinatra was trading passivity for aggression. You could
say that these records hinted at the seeds of Sinatra's future arrogance,
in the sense that the pleasures he sang of were taken almost for granted.
But they were taken lightly and gracefully as well. Sinatra's restlessness
was the emblem of a man who disliked laziness and was therefore forever
looking for new ways to amuse himself. He was renowned for not liking to
do more than two takes of a song, and his phrasing is endlessly inventive.
Listen to the way he played with lyrics. Could anyone else have gotten
away with what he does to "Stars Fell on Alabama" (from "A Swingin'
Affair!") where he changes the chorus to "And stars fractured Bam-ma! last
night"?
Or the invention that's all over "Sinatra and Sextet: Live in Paris," a
1962 date. Opening with "Goody, Goody," he races ahead of the band,
smearing the words together: "Soyoumetsomeonewhosetyoubackonyourheels," as
if he's drawling out of the side of his mouth, until he brings the hammer
down on the title -- "GOODY! GOODY!" -- turning a novelty number into a
(there is no other word) swinging celebration of romantic revenge. That
Paris performance highlights the main tension in Sinatra's vocals, the
tension between sustained notes and long melodic lines, and seemingly
tossed-off, almost spoken, phrasing. (Pete Welding, who has supplied the
notes for the Capitol CD reissues, writes of the almost schizophrenic
nature of Sinatra's changing style and approach.)
It's unquestionable that Sinatra set a style and an attitude for the
singers who followed him. But it's nearly impossible to talk about his
influence in terms of vocal technique because his style is without
parallel. As it did for Miles Davis or John Coltrane when they covered
standards, melody exists for Sinatra as a guide against which to work his
endless variations. He plays hide-and-seek with the band, speeding ahead
and daring them to keep up, or lingering without warning over words and
inviting them to stretch out. On his definitive "Moonlight in Vermont"
(from "Live in Paris"), Sinatra stretches out the word "evening," first
taking it on a slide down the scale and then, when it comes round again,
holding the first syllable until his voice breaks and he lowers himself
into the rest of the word. You can hear the sextet suddenly catching
itself to sustain the note behind him.
"Songs for Swingin' Lovers!" from 1956 is not just a Sinatra album I can
listen to any time (something I can't say about the "sad" albums, which I
reserve for brooding). To me, the album is the most perfect blend of the
two sides of Sinatra's persona, the dreamer and the swinger.
A word of warning is in order for anyone who bought Sinatra on Capitol's
"Nice Price" vinyl series in the '80s. As it did with the Beach Boys'
offerings in the same series, Capitol deleted up to four cuts per album.
The CD reissues restore the whole album and often add bonus tracks. For
vinyl junkies, EMI reissued the albums intact in England in the '80s. All
21 of them traveled back with me from one particular trip to London.
Essential? Sure. Along with the Beatles and Dylan's '60s work, Sinatra's
Capitol albums represent the greatest sustained achievement of any pop
recording artist.
Over the 15 tracks of "Songs for Swingin' Lovers," Sinatra sings sad songs
and happy ones, but with the exception of "We'll Be Together Again," even
the sad songs don't stay sad for very long. Part of the credit goes to
Nelson Riddle's flawless arrangements: Horns provide brightness and punch
without ever becoming overbearing, strings are used sparingly and kept in
the background, never acquiring even a hint of schmaltz.
"It Happened in Monterey" can sum up the album's approach. Sinatra is
singing of how he lost a woman in Mexico "and gave away the key to
paradise." Riddle's arrangement prods him out of his reverie. The brass
comes to the fore and damned if Sinatra, broken heart and all, doesn't
start swinging, breaking up the lyrics into something resembling
percussion: "Stars/ Steel guitars/ Lips as red as wine/ Broke/ Somebody's
heart/ And I fear/ That it was mine."
It's a pattern he also follows on "Too Marvelous for Words," where he
turns a vocabulary list -- "Glorious/ Glamorous/ And that old standby
amorous" -- into a hipster's lexicon.
Sinatra takes songs that other artists have proffered like tattered
valentines and turns them into irresistible invitations, as if he were
approaching some lovely to cut loose on the dance floor. If you've heard
Maurice Chevalier's oozy Gallicisms on "You Brought a New Kind of Love to
Me" -- "Eef ah nahtengale, coul' seeng lak yooo" (or even if you've just
heard the Marx Brothers imitating Chevalier in "Monkey Business"), what
Sinatra does is damn near flabbergasting. It's not just the switched
lyrics ("I'm hip that I'm the slave"), it's the charming cockiness within
the phrasing.
With a muted horn providing just the right accentuation, Sinatra, in a
light, higher-than-usual register, swings the melody. The downward
trajectories of some lines ("They'd sing much sweeter than they do")
almost take on the quality of a sly punch line. And yet, dreamy and
wised-up, the performance is never less than romantic. Sinatra sings it as
a courtier dressed in fedora, cufflinks and loosened tie.
Throughout the album, there are examples of those tinkered-with lyrics. On
"Makin' Whoopee," Sinatra sings "A lot of shoes/ A gang of rice." (A gang
of rice?) And when the album swings, as on "That Old Devil Moon," it
swings hard. Like a jazzman reaching for a joint, "I've Got You Under My
Skin" is so blithe in its conflation of love and addiction that the cool
effrontery of it can slide right by you.
But for me, the album's masterpiece is "I Thought About You." A
little-known song by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Mercer, it's the sort of
standard you might expect from Edward Hopper had he been a songwriter
instead of a painter. The singer, separated from the woman he loves, is on
a night train, peeking out the shade at the moonlit little towns that
slide by his window. Each sight, recounted in language as spare as a line
drawing, nonetheless takes on the richness of a painted canvas. It's the
ordinary transformed into a nighttime dreamscape, lighting a low steady
flame in the singer who longs to belong somewhere -- in the arms of the
woman he is leaving behind, or in one of the houses whose lit windows he
can see from the train. It's Sinatra's version of the ineffable passage
near the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," where the
narrator, Nick Carraway, recounts his college Christmas trips home to the
Midwest:
"When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow,
began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the
dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came
suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back
from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity
with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably
into it again."
That's a perfect description for how Sinatra turned the persona of the
romantic loner into an American ideal. Who wouldn't welcome heartbreak if
it allowed these elegant and exquisite flights of feeling? Elsewhere on
"Songs for Swingin' Lovers!" Sinatra is his own Gatsby, the ordinary
American kid who entered a self-created world of luxury and style and
wealth. But Gatsby without the longing, with the spring still in his step
and the swing never far from his voice.
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