Doing some research on Sinatra's transition from Columbia to Capitol and came across the following in Pleasants, a great book that deserves wider recognition.
“What changed was not so much the singer as the song and the backing. Toward the end of his contract with Columbia he had complained about the kind of song material he was getting. Some sides he cut at that time with backings by Sy Oliver and Phil Moore suggest that he sensed, even then, the need of livelier, more imaginative, gutsier arrangements than he had been receiving at Columbia from Axel Stordahl.
With the move to Capitol, Stordahl gave way to Nelson Riddle, Billy May and Gordon Jenkins. Riddle, especially, according to Sinatra's biographer, Arnold Shaw, was "the major architect of the swinging Capitol Sinatra." The languishing strings were not banished, but they were made to fit into a breezier, more buoyant context. On up-tempo numbers the backing was big band. A vocalist who could manage both the melancholy "In the Wee Small Hours" and the exuberant "Anything Goes" was predestined for that moment in American musical history when swing left the dance floor and moved in behind the singers.
Also new was the fact that Sinatra was now listened to as a singer. During his earlier incarnation people were more concerned with what he was doing to the bobby-soxers than with what he was doing with his voice. As far as singing was concerned he was regarded as a no-voice freak. Even with the earlier crooning styles of Rudy Vallee, Russ Columbo and Bing Crosby fresh in their ears, most listeners found it impossible to take this gentle breathing and sighing, moaning and mooing (as it seemed to them) seriously as singing.
Actually, what was so admirable in Sinatra's singing in the last twenty years of his career can be heard today in his earliest records. Voice and style were not so mature, or so rich in the subtleties and refinements of phrase and enunciation, or in the variety of vocal coloration. The voice itself was lighter, lacking the later dark warmth of the middle and lower registers. The upper notes were sometimes ill-focused. But all the elements that subsequently combined to make him one of the great singers of the century—a seamless legato, an intuitive grasp of phrasing, a feeling for the meaning and music of words, and the warmth and intimacy of the voice itself, conveying a sense of sympathy and sincerity—were present then and can be heard on the records he made with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey.
The one man who, from the very beginning, sensed his true worth and potential was—Frank Sinatra.”
