Bud Shank, the late, great alto saxophonist is often quoted as saying: “The one thing you need to play this music is concentration.”
But each musician goes about their business in a different way with regard to said “concentration.”
I would checkout the lead trumpet and first alto parts of a big band arrangement and memorize where the cues were for the “kickers” so that I could really pop the drum fills that powered the arrangement forward.
The legendary guitarist Tal Farlow memorized the rapid harmonic runs of the monster pianist Art Tatum so that he could insert these in the parts of his solos where they would work - some trick!
Vocalists Bing Crosby and Billie Holiday channeled Louis Armstrong’s trumpet phrasing into the manner in which they enunciated the lyrics to popular songs in order to make them sound “Jazzier.”
But the epitome of the use of concentration in order to bring out the special inner qualities of a song’s melody may be the one described in the following piece by the author James Kaplan that appeared in the November 29, 2015 issue of The Wall Street Journal.
“A friend of mine was flying back from Europe a few years ago and began talking with his seatmate, a gentleman who happened to be a Swedish opera singer. Somehow Frank Sinatra came up, and, as my friend told me, the singer suddenly turned very grave. “Ah,” he said. “That is a voice without equal.”
Something about Frank has sunk in deeply, from San Francisco to Stockholm. In his centennial year — he was born Dec. 12, 1915 — Sinatra is much in the air, and with good reason. We celebrate his artistry, his matchless personal style, his undying charisma, his apparently inexhaustible effect on American culture.
One question I’m often asked as a Sinatra biographer is what surprised me most about my research. I usually have the feeling—Frank being Frank — that some juicy tidbit of gossip, heretofore unearthed, is what I’m being asked for. My answer probably lets people down: The most surprising thing I found out was how very hard he worked on his singing.
Though he dropped out at 16 from A.J. Demarest High School in Hoboken, N.J., Frank had a brilliant and inquisitive mind; he was verbally gifted, with an original way of expressing himself in the many notes and letters he wrote over the decades. For instance, in 1988 Daniel Okrent wrote an Esquire essay praising Sinatra’s late-age durability. In response, the Chairman sent Mr. Okrent a graceful missive thanking him for helping to “explain me to me with a rose in your prose” and for applying his “X-ray word-processor to see so deeply into the heart and soul of this very lucky son of Hoboken who remains eternally overcome at God’s plan for his life.”
Sinatra was a self-educated man, a lifelong reader, mainly of biographies. When it came to popular songs, the lyrics mattered as much to him as the music, if not more. And as soon as he began singing professionally, he started a practice that he continued throughout his career.
“I take a sheet with just the lyrics. No music,” he once told the casino mogul Steve Wynn. “At that point, I’m looking at a poem. I’m trying to understand the point of view of the person behind the words. I want to understand his emotions. Then I start speaking, not singing, the words so I can experiment and get the right inflections. When I get with the orchestra, I sing the words without a microphone first, so I can adjust the way I’ve been practicing to the arrangement. I’m looking to fit the emotion behind the song that I’ve come up with to the music. Then it all comes together.”
Once he sang that number, on record or on stage, he inhabited that lyric, felt it so deeply that anyone listening felt it, too. Combine that with his genius ear and the phrasing he learned from Billie Holiday’s vocals and Tommy Dorsey’s trombone solos. The result is that Sinatra gives the eerie impression that he is thinking these thoughts, feeling these feelings, in the moment the listener is hearing about them. Nobody else quite manages to bring this off.
I’ve studied and written about Frank Sinatra for 10 years, and though I’ve sometimes disliked him, I’ve never been bored with him. His best singing—of which there is a very great deal—still gives me goosebumps, every time. I believe that we will still be celebrating Sinatra, and listening to him, next year, and the year after that, and (as the title of another of his numbers has it) a hundred years from today.
Mr. Kaplan is the author of “Sinatra: The Chairman,” just out from Doubleday.”
Gregg Field worked with the legendary singer for the last few years of Sinatra's professional career. In honor of Ol’ Blue Eyes’s 100th birthday, Field reflects back on both the good and the bad.
The following appeared in the December 11, 2015 edition of Vanity Fair magazine.
It’s very difficult for musical artists, especially those who’ve reached the artistic stature of a “Frank Sinatra” to know when to stop performing in public. Sometimes nature makes the decision for them.
I witnessed such a situation with Tony Bennett at the Hollywood Bowl in the summer of 2018 during a two hour performance that included many examples of the mind of a brilliant performer going awry.
The forgotten lyrics, the oft-repeated introductions of band members, and the ever-increasing errors in performing the music eventually led to canceled performances later that year and none thereafter.
What was amazing was how well, under the circumstances, Tony’s courage, will and professionalism brought the whole two hour performance off considering that he was 92 at the time!
“There was no grand announcement, no farewell tour. He had tried that 20 years earlier, and it didn’t stick. But on February 25, 1995, after singing for more than 60 years for kings, queens, pirates, and presidents, Frank Sinatra stepped out on a stage in front of adoring fans for what would unknowingly be the last time.
As his drummer, I knew the day would come. With every year and every passing performance, Frank’s prophetic “My Way” lyric, “And now the end is near, and so I face the final curtain,” became more difficult to ignore. Sinatra graced thousands of stages, grand and gritty, over the course of 70 years. I first became part of Frank’s world in 1981 as a member of Count Basie’s band, then permanently a few years later after Irv Cottler, Sinatra’s close friend and drummer of over 30 years, died. It was a rough time for Frank on a personal but also musical level—he burned through four drummers and two bass players in six months. When conductor Frank Jr. called to offer me the gig with his father, I never for a moment considered turning it down.
“Let me think about it,” I joked. “Yes!”
Working for Sinatra was a coveted and cushy gig: first-class travel to glamorous corners of the world like Barcelona, Japan, Paris, or Hong Kong, extended stays at Ritz-Carltons and Peninsulas, and never having to wait (I mean never) for a table at an Italian restaurant. But it was never about the perks. It was all about the music.
The musical relationship between Frank and his musicians, especially his drummer, was intense and personal. Frank loved the powerful rhythmic propulsion at his back, often driven by a cracking “back beat” on the snare that he wanted targeted dead in the middle of his unparalleled rhythmic sense. It was 80 percent reaction and 20 percent action. If I let up, even for an instant, he would turn my way looking for more heat. I never took my eyes off of him.
Yet despite our intense stage relationship, a year into my role I had never so much as lifted a glass with him, much less held a conversation. I thought it odd—I was a fan too, after all. But it was Bill Miller, Frank’s longtime pianist, who told me early on that “Frank needs a drummer, not another friend.” I got it.That all changed one late night in 1992, at the Monaco Red Cross Gala, in Monte Carlo.
We had finished the concert and it was about two A.M. when I was walking through the lobby of the Hotel de Paris. As I passed the bar on the left, I saw that Frank was holding court with the usual suspects— Gregory and Veronique Peck, Roger Moore, Frank’s wife, Barbara, and her son, Bobby Marx. Bobby caught my eye and motioned for me to join the table. I instantly remembered the words of Bill Miller and waved him off. But Bobby motioned again, and the idea of joining that group was irresistible.
Bobby got Frank’s attention.
“Your drummer wants a drink!”
“My drummer doesn’t drink,” Frank said.
“Oh, he drinks Jack Daniels!”
The next thing I know a waiter comes to the table and presents a silver platter with a bucket of ice, an empty glass, and a fifth of Jack. Frank got up from the end of the table, walked over, pulled a chair up next to me and said, “It’s time I get to know my drummer.”
For the next couple of hours we talked about music, music, and more music. Frank’s bass player Chuck Berghofer, who had joined us, asked Frank how he always had such impossibly great rhythm and timing. “I just get a cuckoo rhythm section and get out of the way,” Frank said.
At some point the talk turned from music to personal to . . . Jack Kennedy. Frank began to tell us the story of how Joe Kennedy had called him during his son’s election, asking for help using his connections in swaying the Illinois and West Virginia vote. Frank obliged. Once his close friend was in the White House, however, he couldn’t get a return call, and this night, all the years “Holy shit,” I thought. “This isn’t something I’ve heard on TV. This is the real thing!"
It was only a year and a half or so before the final concert that we got wind
of a new Sinatra-album project in the works, Duets, where Frank would be paired with seemingly every major music star of the day. The concept was not without its risks. Frank hadn’t been in a studio since L.A. Is My Lady 10 years before, and some thought that he would never step foot in one again—most noticeably, the former head of Reprise and Warner Bros. Records Mo Ostin, who is rumored to have turned down the album for that very reason. It went to Capitol Records instead.
Any doubts about Sinatra’s ability to deliver vanished as soon as it hit the market. The album exploded worldwide and became the best-selling album of his career, going triple platinum.
But even with historic success, I often heard critics say that Frank’s voice on Duets wasn’t what it was. It was the album producer Phil Ramone who said, while listening to the new recording of “One for My Baby,” that those looking for the Sinatra of years past were missing the point. “You don’t get it, that’s 60 years of pain, whiskey, and Ava all in that vocal.”
The signs of Frank’s difficulty carrying a concert however began before Duets and were slow but relentless as time progressed. There was the concert in front of the great cathedral in Cologne, Germany, where Frank shouted to the crowd: “Two of my favorite cities, New York and London!” It was a night during the December 1993 run at the MGM Grand, in Las Vegas, however, that seemed to spell the beginning of the end. Frank’s memory and ability to read the teleprompter that evening were so impaired that he would stop mid-song, looking confused and unable to remember the lyrics. Frank knew as well as anyone he hadn’t delivered and immediately after the concert summoned his manager, ordering him to give the patrons their money back.
Backstage before the concert the next night, I asked Hank Cattaneo, Sinatra’s longtime trusted friend and production manager, how the “Old Man” (our term of endearment for Frank) was.
“Fine, why?” he said.
“What about last night?”
“Yesterday’s news.”
And Hank was right. While not perfect, this night bore no resemblance to the previous night’s disaster and left us scratching our heads.
For a while, it seemed things had settled back to what we had accepted as normal with Sinatra’s occasional forgetting of lyrics or a second telling of the same anecdote. Just months before the end, things even looked like they were changing for the better. There was a concert at Tanglewood, in the Berkshires, where Frank never once relied on any of the four giant teleprompters downstage. Or Harbor Lights in Boston, which was nothing short of flawless—probably due to the fact that Frank’s temporary road doctor had refused to give him the potentially fog-inducing meds we were told he had been taking just before going onstage. And there was Chicago, where Frank opened at the new United Center with a kinetic performance of “My Kind of Town.” It was vintage Sinatra, and the audience and musicians knew this was a special night.
But then came Japan.
The trip was cursed from the start. Frank had borrowed Kirk Kerkorian’s plane for the trip, and what should have been a 12-hour, nonstop commercial flight turned into a 16-hour marathon after the private jet had to refuel twice on the way. Frank arrived at the hotel looking beat up, with less than 24 hours to go before the concert.
Sinatra was—and still is—huge in Japan. Despite the concert being in the 30,000-seat Fukuoka Dome baseball stadium, many fans came dressed in black-tie and gowns to celebrate Sinatra’s grand return—some arriving hours before the concert started.
From the moment “Ladies and gentlemen, Frank Sinatra!” echoed across the stadium, I knew something was wrong. Frank was moving slowly, his eyes were glassy, and he looked confused. As the concert went on he kept forgetting lyrics and introduced his conductor and son, Frank Jr., multiple times. Frank Jr., as discreetly as possible, would leave his conductor’s position to try to help his father, to no avail.
When the concert finished we headed straight back to the Nikko hotel bar for an over-serving of $25 Japanese Jack. No one was quite sure what to say. The handlers were joking, “Oh, that’s probably just the Old Man drinking all the way to Japan,” but we were silently asking the same questions. Was it the flight? Was it meds? Was it just time to finally call it quits?
The next night’s performance was even worse, with Frank almost completely losing his ability to even remember which song he was singing.
We were nearing the end of the concert, when the familiar saloon intro to “One for My Baby” began. Frank walked to the piano, lit a cigarette, motioned a toast, and took a sip of whiskey. It was mostly a prop. Within seconds he had lost his way, stumbling through the lyric. He managed to get out the words: “We’re drinkin’, my friend, to the end . . .”
I knew he was right.
That night was the last public performance of Frank Sinatra’s career. None of us—not his pals, his musicians, his family, or 30,000 Japanese fans—had any idea we were all witnessing history. Not even Frank.”
The year 1995 only had one date on its calendar: the invitation-only Frank Sinatra Celebrity Invitational gala in Palm Desert. It was tradition for Frank to sing one or two songs before sending everyone off to the bar. It was to be an easy performance, but a performance nonetheless.
When I saw Frank that afternoon at rehearsal he looked like a different man. He was tan, rested, and in a great mood, even joking as he started to sing that he “thought he swallowed a shot glass.”
That night he opened with “I’ve Got the World on a String,” and it was the Frank of old. Didn’t miss a word or note. Then, he called another song. And then another song, and then another. By the time he left the stage we had done a mini-Sinatra concert with Frank performing six classics. And with mic and the audience in hand, he sang his final message: “The best is yet to come, come the day you’re mine . . . And I’m gonna make you mine!” It was perfect. Frank swinging on top, owning it, and then disappearing into the chilly desert night.
The last time I saw Frank was in June of that year. His longtime assistant Dorothy Uhlemann called to invite me to join Frank for a Father’s Day dinner at Arnie Morton’s in Beverly Hills, a favorite Sinatra haunt.
As usual, we all congregated at the bar. Frank asked what I was having. The answer was, of course, Jack—but when his back was turned, I whispered to the bartender to add a little ginger ale.
Turns out he wasn’t as far away as I thought.
“Would you like a little apple pie with your whiskey?” he asked.
That was the last time I ever ruined perfectly good hootch.
It was nearly two A.M. when the celebrations were over. As we headed out the door and into the night, Frank said to no one in particular, “I sure miss Smokey.”
I’ll never know what caused him to think about Sammy Davis Jr. at that moment but he was in a sentimental mood by the end of the evening. As he climbed into his car, Frank reached out and shook my hand.
“See ya, pally,” he said.
At that moment all my Sinatra times turned into memories.
Driving home I had “Come Fly with Me” blasting in the car. It reminded me of a favorite toast of Frank’s: “May you live to be a hundred and may the last voice you hear be mine!”
If I can’t have the former, the latter will do.
*Gregg Field is a seven-time Grammy-winning producer and musician. *
In researching material for the blog, I’m constantly amazed at how tight-knit and relatively small the Jazz community is and how this has been the case almost since the music’s inception, but especially during the first quarter century of its existence when everyone seemed to know everyone.
The phrase that’s often used today to describe such a phenomenon is “six degrees of separation” that reflects a theme in which everyone on earth is theoretically separated from everyone else by only six people.
As a case in point, when I did some background on the 1967 [released in 1968] Reprise album that Frank Sinatra made with Duke Ellington’s Orchestra, I was surprised to learn that Frank had wanted to make such a recording with the Duke as early as 1942 - 25 years earlier!
And, although there was a “Billy” involved as the arranger of music on this recording, it wasn’t the usual “Billy” associated with Ellington, as in Strayhorn, but rather Billy May!!
And May’s favorite edition of the Ellington orchestra was the famous - wait for it - [Jimmy] Blanton-[Ben] Webster aggregation which was together from 1940-1942!!!
The source for all of this information is Will Friedwald’s Sinatra! The Song Is You [1995] and there are many more insights about the Sinatra-Ellington project and its history in the following excerpts from Will’s definitive book on Sinatra and “The Singer’s Art.”
“Swing Along with Me/Sinatra Swings worked out so well that it outfoxed itself. It was so good, there was no topping it, leaving Reprise content with one Frank Sinatra-Billy May album in the catalogue while Sinatra concentrated on projects with Sy Oliver, Neil Hefti, Robert Farnon, and others. Sinatra, as head of Reprise, kept May busy with, among other things, an album with Ethel Merman, and while there never was a subsequent Sinatra-May set, the two men worked on numerous odds and ends together. …
In the fall of 1967, either Bill Miller [Sinatra’s pianist] or producer Sonny Burke notified May that Reprise wanted him to do another album with Sinatra. This one was to use the orchestra of Duke Ellington and would eventually be released as Francis A. & Edward K., May was selected not only for his familiarity with the idiosyncratic voices of both halves of the proposed equation but because of his reputation as a musical mimic. "Billy May can write any way, like anyone," claimed trumpeter Zeke Zarchy. "If you say you want a Duke Ellington arrangement or a this-guy arrangement, Billy can write like that. But he also can write like himself." (May had previously recreated the sounds of Jimmie Lunceford and Kay Kyser for Capitol and would later re-record virtually the entire swing era for Time-Life Records.)
The idea of May writing for Ellington was as much a surprise for Sinatra as it was for May. On some level he had been considering a collaboration with Ellington for at least twenty years, but when he began planning the Ellington album in earnest in the early Reprise years, he assumed that Billy Strayhorn, Ellington's composing and arranging partner of twenty-eight years, would handle the orchestrations. But after years of illness, Strayhorn, who was only a month older than Sinatra, died on May 31, 1967. (Supposedly, Sinatra paid part of his medical expenses.) Plans for the album continued, however, and Sinatra and Burke switched from one Billy to another. Far from resenting being second choice, May remembered, "I felt very flattered that they asked me after Billy died."
May's relationship with Strayhorn, who had also grown up in Pittsburgh, went back even before Strayhorn went to work with Ellington. "I started my professional career at a little place on Station Street in Pittsburgh called Charlie Ray's," Strayhorn once reminisced. "They had a little place upstairs, and the bandstand was about a flight and a half up. Billy May used to come to this place and play trumpet and trombone. He would come up and sit with us in our little nest. We were up above the room in a little bandstand, above the steps. They used to throw people down the steps every night, unruly people."
When May went to work for Charlie Barnet at the end of 1938, he discovered that the leader was such an obsessive Ellington devotee, he could not have learned more about Ellington's music had he apprenticed with the Duke himself. In his two years with Barnet, he scored a number of Ellington items, including "In a Mizz," "Rockin' in Rhythm," "The Sergeant Was Shy," "Ring Dem Bells," and "Merry Go Round," that were faithful both to their sources and Barnet's burgeoning style. While with Glenn Miller, May conceived of a brilliantly Millerized treatment of "Take the A Train" that wrapped Strayhorn's melody in Miller's patented clarinet-led reeds. (May's later "Say It Isn't So" detours unexpectedly through "A Train" 's piano solo and countermelody.)
"Duke was a big influence on me since the days I was with Barnet," said May. "He was such a pioneer, you know. He really did amazing things. I have records of Duke's from the '30s, and God! They're doing things that some of these modern bop guys are just doing now."
In the early '50s when he launched the Billy May Orchestra, first in the studios and then on the road, May's primary inspirations were Ellington and the two-beat sound of the then-defunct Jimmie Lunceford band, as masterminded for Lunceford by future Dorsey-Sinatra arranger Sy Oliver. When May later related to Oliver how influential he had been, "Sy told me that Duke was a big influence on him and that he actually got that [Lunceford] sound from Duke. There are some two-beat things that Duke did, and he just didn't follow up on it. But Sy told me that's where he got the idea." The two-beat "All I Need Is the Girl" on Francis A. & Edward K. illustrates the myriad connections between the sounds of Ellington, Oliver, and May.
Sinatra first met Ellington in about the spring or summer of 1942. "He was with Tommy Dorsey," Ellington later wrote. "They all came down to the College Inn at the Sherman Hotel in Chicago where we were playing, and I think it was just about the time he was ready to split the Dorsey gig. I could tell that by the way Tommy said good night to him!" Always one for fancy handles, Ellington seems to have perpetually referred to the singer as "Francis." Sinatra had also already become friends with Al Hibbler, who in May 1943 became the major male vocalist of the Ellington band.
In the fall of '42, Sinatra and Ellington crossed paths again when Sinatra, by that time playing as a single, shared a movie theater bill with the Ellington band at the State in Hartford, Connecticut. "I played three days at a theater in Hartford when Ellington was there," Sinatra later recalled, "and believe me, it was one of the biggest kicks of my life." Both were to enjoy major triumphs within a few months, Sinatra at his breakthrough New York Paramount booking that December, and Ellington at his premier Carnegie Hall concert a few weeks later.
Ellington and Sinatra couldn't have spent much time together offstage during the Hartford engagement because the composer was furiously struggling between shows to finish the forty-five-minute Black, Brown and Beige in time for Carnegie Hall. The film was the noir classic The Cat People, and Ellington later quipped to aide Stanley Dance that he wasn't sure which had the greater impact on his muse while he wrote this pivotal piece, Sinatra or The Cat People. When Ellington guested on Sinatra's Broadway Bandbox program later in 1943," BB&B was a subject of their banter. [Ellington did not play behind Sinatra on that early meeting; he hadn't brought his band along and performed instead as a featured soloist accompanied by the Raymond Scott-Axel Stordahl orchestra.]. However, Sinatra and Ellington possibly did work together informally. Later that year; as Billy Strayhorn remembered in 1962, Sinatra would occasionally sit in with the Ducal aggregation during their stay at New York's Hurricane Club.
Sinatra's love for Ellington's music was well known, although he rarely attempted to combine the Duke's ideas with his own. Sinatra recorded far fewer songs by Ellington than he did, say, by Walter Donaldson. Only two Ellington tunes appear on the classic Sinatra Capitol albums, "Mood Indigo" on In the Wee Small Hours and "I Got It Bad" on A Swingin’ Affair. In the Reprise period, only "I'm Beginning to See the Light" (like "I Didn't Know About You," done on an aircheck in the mid-1940s) turns up, on the 1962 Sinatra and Swingin' Brass. In 1955, Sinatra and Nelson Riddle also recorded a Capitol single of "How Could You Do a Thing Like That to Me?," a pop tune by Ellingtonian Tyree Glenn based on the melody of the 1947 "Sultry Serenade," which the trombonist had written and performed with Ellington.
Sinatra's attempt at Strayhorn's best-known vocal ballad, "Lush Life," which he bit off at the overloaded Felix Slatkin session for Only the Lonely, was at once marked for greatness and failure. The first came in Nelson Riddle's masterful arrangement, which juxtaposes a deliberately out-of-tune piano against a Coplandesque string section. The second in that, as Bill Miller recalled, Sinatra "didn't take the trouble to learn it" correctly and tried it at an already overbooked date.
Although he turned in a stunning tune number eight, "Willow, Weep for Me," he didn't have the physical fortitude to make it through number seven, Strayhorn's ambitious air. "It's a rather complicated song, and I think Frank would have been momentarily put off by all the changes that had to go on," said Riddle. "Not that he couldn't have sung it with ease and beautifully had he tried a couple more times." On the sole circulating partial take of the three allegedly recorded, Sinatra gets through the out-of-tempo "verse" section but breaks down in the refrain. After a characteristic Kingfish impression, he resolves to "put it aside for about a year." Sinatra later told Miller that he had decided to "leave that one for Nat Cole."
Sinatra had expressed interest in recording with Duke Ellington as early as 1947. At the conclusion of the "Body and Soul"/ "I'm Glad There Is You" session of November 9 of that year, Sinatra and CBS producer George Avakian were making small talk when Avakian informed Sinatra that Ellington would be recording in the same studio two days later. Sinatra then said something to the effect of "You know, I've always wanted to make a record with Duke." Avakian, a keen fan of both men, summarily brought Sinatra's idea to Manie Sachs, but the A&R chief wasn't particularly interested. "As great as Duke was, he wasn't selling a lot of records for us at that time," said Avakian. "Manie realized that Ellington was important and that he should be on the label, but he didn't give him a lot of attention."
Sinatra and Ellington formally began doing business together in 1962, when the Maestro switched from a contract with Columbia to a handshake agreement with Sinatra and Reprise. Ellington recorded almost as prolifically for the company as Sinatra did in the next three years (a fact that only a discographer might be aware of, since the Ellington Reprise albums have been reissued only on other labels, primarily Atlantic and Discovery). As early as 1964, the label announced a forthcoming Sinatra-Ellington album. [Mosaic Records subsequently issued a 5 CD boxed set of Duke Ellington: The Reprise Studio Recordings MD5 193 in 1999].
Sinatra had already recorded with a number of Ellingtonians, including Juan Tizol, Willie Smith, and Al Sears. Three of Duke's men appear with Sinatra on the 1946 Metronome All-Stars date: Johnny Hodges, Lawrence Brown, and Harry Lanney. In 1960, tenor great Ben Webster recorded the first ever Reprise album, and in 1962 he solos on "Beginning to See the Light." on Sinatra and Swinging Brass.
Sinatra made a point of giving Ellington the same creative autonomy he sought for himself in founding the label, and he also granted Ellington license to produce sessions by other artists whose work he deemed worthy, resulting in the first American release by the South African piano great Dollar Brand. The output of Sinatra and Ellington ran along parallel lines when The Concert Sinatra and The Symphonic Ellington were recorded on two different continents in February 1963. Commercial considerations impacted equally on both artists, as could be witnessed on releases such as Sinatra '65 and Ellington '65, and on occasions when both were importuned to record Beatles songs. In 1966, Sinatra arranged for Ellington to write the score to his film Assault on a Queen.
Adding Ellington to his label was one way in which Sinatra could, eventually, incorporate the Ellington sound into his own work. Another was by hiring Strayhorn himself. According to David Hajdu, author of the forthcoming first biography of Strayhorn, one of the arranger-composer's roommates recalls that Sinatra called Strayhorn several times in the early 60s, offering him the chance to do some work for Reprise, both for Sinatra and, presumably, to make records under his own name. However, Ellington himself was always overly protective of his most crucial collaborator, sometimes in ways that could be construed as furthering his own interests over Strayhorn's. He soon got wind of Sinatra's offer and squelched it, not by ordering Strayhorn not to accept, but by overloading him with so much work that he could never consider outside offers.
Sinatra also attempted to get Strayhorn on his team through Al Hibbler, who had left the Ellington organization in 1951 for a successful solo career. After a series of hit singles and excellent albums for Decca, Hibbler's career was gradually running out of steam by 1960, thanks partially to his breaking from his former manager and partially to his involvement with the civil rights movement. However, Sinatra realized that a new Hibbler album, with state-of-the-art production and ace arrangements (by Gerald Wilson), could have financial as well as musical merit, and personally called Hibbler to suggest such a project in 1961.
And he still wanted Strayhorn. Hibbler remembers, "When I went with Sinatra to Reprise, Frank asked me, 'Can you get Strayhorn?' I said 'I doubt it, man!' I asked Strayhorn, and Strayhorn went and told Duke. Hibbler continued, "Duke came to me and said, 'Man I don't appreciate you trying to take my arranger! You took what you could get from me, and now you're trying to break up my band!" I said, 'No, I wouldn't do that.'"
This might have been the incident that provoked Ellington into leaving Reprise in 1965. "They weren't too close, because Duke always accused Frank of trying to take Billy Strayhorn from him," says Hibbler "and he accused me of trying to help him." For the remaining nine years of his life, Ellington became a free agent contractually, producing his own sessions, as in effect he always had, and selling the masters to whatever outfit was interested. He would record only one more album for Reprise, and that was Francis A. & Edward K.
All this was in the background when Billy May began working on the arrangements for the album in 1967, beginning as always by setting the keys with Bill Miller for the eight tunes already selected by Sinatra and Sonny Burke. In addition to a series of singles with guest vocalists as worthy as Bing Crosby in 1932 and as bizarre as Johnnie Ray in 1958, Ellington had done two ground-breaking albums with Rosemary Clooney and Ella Fitzgerald. Both the Clooney and Fitzgerald projects had been Songbook albums of all Ellington-Strayhorn compositions, and Sinatra might have gone that route had Strayhorn been alive. But just as Sinatra wanted May to provide a bridge between the Ellington universe and his own, he chose a mixture of old and new (largely non-Ellington) songs that fit a middle ground. Sinatra rarely chose to duplicate what other singers had done before him and wasn't a believer in the Songbook concept to begin with.
Sinatra and May restricted the song selections to eight extra-long tracks, leaving plenty of room for the imaginations of both May mid his soloists — Johnny Hodges, Cootie Williams, Paul Gonsalves, Lawrence Brown, and the rest — to stretch out. Sinatra and Burke selected only one overtly commercial number, the Bobby Neff hit "Sunny," graced primarily by Harry Carney's endlessly resonant baritone sax lines.
Around the third week of November, May and Miller flew up to Seattle, where Ellington was working to try out the charts in a rehearsal without Sinatra. "We rehearsed them all afternoon and, Jesus, the rehearsal was terrible," said May. "They were all terrible sight readers in that band. The drummer, Sam Woodyard, couldn't read music at all. But they had a trick where he had to watch one of the saxophone player's feet for when he'd stop playing and when he'd start. So the second time through, the saxophone player would mark his part, and he'd move his foot or something, and that would be the cue for the drummer. It was all shit like that."
Most of the studio men whom Sinatra, May, and Riddle were used to working with had all spent time with the touring swing bands. Still, in the studios it was just as important to be able to read a piece of music as if it were a newspaper as it was to be able to play with a strong swing feeling, for a Sinatra sideman anyway. However, Ellington's sidemen didn't learn Ellington's music by reading it, said May, "they got it by playing every night, and when they got it, it was fine." Many of the finest improvisors couldn't have made the studio grade, reading-wise. Harry Edison was an exception, and he has noted that in the beginning Riddle was especially generous in helping him with his sight reading.
"We went through the whole album, we rehearsed it all," May continued. "Duke made a big issue out of saying to me, “Oh, get the music ready and we'll rehearse it. We'll play these on the job. I'll play Frank's vocal part on the piano.'" May and Miller attended the band's performance that night, and when Ellington began culling May's charts, they assumed he was going to keep his word. "Well, they have two weeks before the session," May recalled thinking as he and Miller flew back to Los Angeles that night. "If they keep playing them every night like that, they're bound to nail 'em, and everything'll be alright."
However, the Ellington organization was not only the greatest amalgamation of soloing and composing talent the jazz world has known, it was also a band of prima donnas who could only be held together by the biggest ego of them all. Each of Ellington's major players had the talent, the star power, and the reputation to be a leader in his own right. Cootie Williams and Johnny Hodges had been leading groups of their own for years, and many must have felt that only the color of their skins was keeping them sidemen, virtually anonymous. As Mel Tonne had learned in a disastrous tandem billing at New York's Basin Street East, the Duke and his men typically invested energy only in playing Ellington and Strayhorn's own music.
Torme's and May's accounts agree that the band just didn't care to put any effort into the work of outside arrangers; they just didn't care. As May put it, "The older Duke got, the more full of [himself] he became."
The session began on December 11. "I guess it was kind of in doubt as to whether all of the band would show up," engineer Lee Hirschberg recalled. "The guys would have been playing the night before, and maybe having a few drinks, or whatever. So the first day was kind of up in the air as to whether we would get anything done or not. I don't think the guys in the band started arriving until about forty-five minutes after the session started."
At the podium, from the first downbeat on, May realized that "they never touched the charts again; they never even looked at 'em after that day." He reflected, "The best big band that Duke ever had, in my estimation, was about 1940 to 1942 when he had just added the fifth saxophone and got Ben Webster. That's what I tried to write for, to go for that sound. But by 1967 it was completely gone, they had started to go to pot although they still had that distinctive sound."
May's solution was to add a couple of "ringers" to the band, reading studio men who could follow the charts and play in the Ellington style. With one good reader playing lead for each of the sections, the others could gradually follow and get it right. In addition to Al Porcino on trumpet, that also involved replacing "The Piano Player," as Ellington referred to himself. While Ellington did perform on several numbers, so did Jimmy Jones, who was both a great accompanist and an amazing Ellington impersonator. Milt Raksin, a Hollywood pianist best remembered for his work with the bands of Gene Krupa and Tommy Dorsey, also filled in on different numbers.
"You never saw such completely disconnected people in your life," observed Milt Bernhart, who happened to be playing a date in the adjoining studio. "There was Johnny Hodges and Paul Gonsalves, and they were thinking about what they were going to have for dinner that night — everything else but this. It had reached Frank, too. He wasn't really thrilled. At that point somebody wheeled in his birthday cake. It turned out it was his birthday."
Part of the problem was also Sinatra himself. He was not in his best voice that week and sounds too thin in some spots and overly heavy in others, and he also hits an occasional flat note (like the plaintively whining last note on "Come Back to Me"). Sinatra doubtless realized he wasn't operating up to his usual technical standards, and probably, if this had been any other occasion, he would have postponed the dates. But realizing the impossible logistics of getting both himself and the Ellington band in the same studio at the same time, he decided to go through with it. He also had the option of recording orchestral tracks for himself to overdub vocals at a later date, but he might have been aware that hoth the Clooney and Fitzgerald albums with Ellington had been over-dubbed, and realized that they suffered because of it.
Besides, what makes Francis A. & Edward K. a success is how Sinatra works with the Ellingtonians, in a way that could have been captured only with them all in the same room at the same time. Once the sessions began in earnest, Sinatra, May, Ellington, and the studio and regular band members put their egos behind them and got to work. It finally didn't matter that their collective sight-reading skills weren't up to snuff. As engineer Lee Hirschberg stated, "They were just such an incredible hand, it was like they were joined at the base of the skull by some invisible thing. They just locked into everything. It was an amazing session, really."
"That was a hard album, and there's some disastrous shit in there," May put it, "but some of it's awful good." The disc starts with "Follow Me," from Camelot, the musical fable that titled a political era in which Sinatra had played no small part. Years earlier, Sinatra and Riddle had heralded the coming of this "brief shining moment" with "High Hopes," for which the singer had commissioned a new, pro-Kennedy libretto from the original lyricist, Sammy Cahn, as an election jingle. In 1961, to commemorate the coronation of "the wisest, most heroic, most splendid king who ever sat on any throne," Sinatra sang "That Old Jack Magic" around the same time that he and May rerecorded Johnny Mercer's original text for Come Swing with Me. The assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King in 1968 announced the end of that "fleeting wisp of glory known as Camelot," and Sinatra and Ellington anticipated that, too, with the melancholy "Follow Me."
That chart's languid pace and bluish mood set the tone for the album. The Clooney and Fitzgerald sets had proffered a mixture of fast and slow numbers, but Sinatra, who prefers a more consistent tone, decided to concentrate on torpid tempi. That this is one of Sinatra's few slow sets not put together entirely of suicide songs makes it the most erotic of all Sinatra albums; like Ellington Indigos, here is the perfect inspiration for really close slow dancing. Yet at this hardly horse race speed, as May said, "'Follow Me' swings like hell!'
And, apart from being the rare Sinatra LP to mix new and old tunes, Francis A. contains what might be his most concentrated singing. Whether it was the newness of the setting or because he was afraid of missing notes, Sinatra bears down with a super tight intensity. Instead of sounding unrelated—in fact, he's quite loose on “All I Need Is the Girl"—he sounds more keenly centered than ever. For the first time since the '40s he abstains from familiar Frankisms such as "baby" and "jack" and throws in hardly any of his ad hoc lyric alterations.
The only Ellington original out of the eight, "I Like the Sunrise," had been written for Al Hibbler to sing at the start of the composer's 1947 The Liberian Suite, which he had composed in celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the first African republic founded by freed slaves. With its allusions to emancipation, "I Like the Sunrise" was an appropriate aria for a fading Camelot, and Sinatra sings it with reverential majesty, although he supposedly phoned Hibbler after the session and told him, "You're the only guy in the world who can sing that goddamned thing!"
Francis A. & Edward K. features other examples of the kind of pieces that Sinatra and May and Ellington liked to dabble with, as in the exotic contemporary Latin American "Yellow Days" and "Poor Butterfly." May captures the Ellington sound to a "T" throughout, but despite his intentions it's the great 1967 band's texture he pinpoints rather than the more widely celebrated edition of 1942. He really gets it down on "Yellow Days," which contains an instrumental chorus that, after a stunning Johnny Hodges solo, seems to take the band off on a tangent resembling one of the original D or E sections Ellington frequently wrote into his pieces (thereby transcending standard song form) but which is actually based on composer Alvaro Carillo's melody and harmony. "Butterfly," a more directly Puccini-inspired 1916 forerunner to "South of the Border," tells yet another tale of an American Pinkerton loving and leaving a femme foreigner, with Sinatra leaping into a higher and more powerful second chorus.
The track most frequently cited as the album's masterpiece bears another quasi-exotic reference in its title, "Indian Summer"—a cut May described as "just outstanding." When asked to name his favorite arrangement for Sinatra, Nelson Riddle selected "Indian Summer," citing it as the only chart he wished he had written. The beauty of the piece is its simplicity; it never attracts attention to itself or the ensemble but functions as a velvety background for Sinatra and Johnny Hodges, who contributes one of the most sensual solos of his life. Milt Bernhart remembers it as "the only thing really good that happened" on the date: "Hodges played that alto solo in the middle, and it's really quintessential Johnny Hodges."
Bernhart has explained that Sinatra and his musicians usually had an unspoken empathy, preferring not to blow their cools; only if a soloist played something really extraordinary would Sinatra offer more than one or two complimentary words. The most enthusiastic Bernhart ever saw Sinatra get was after the playback of "Indian Summer": "He said, 'My God! That's unbelievable, John.'" Hodges, as usual, said nothing.
Sinatra bookends Francis A. with key songs from consecutive Alan Jay Lerner shows, concluding with the set's one out-and-out uptempo, "Come Back to Me" (he had already recorded "On a Clear Day" from the same score). For this hard and fast number, May turned for inspiration to Ellington's famous "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue," first written and recorded in 1937 and spectacularly revived at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival. Although May has insisted that he likes "the old version better because there's some really nice clarinet things," he features Paul Gonsalves here, remembering the tenorist who drove the crowd wild at Newport with twenty-seven spontaneous choruses as, to say the least, "an exciting player."
Apart from Gonsalves' soaring statement, "Come Back to Me" has Sinatra and the band racing and roaring and rocking in rhythm, the muted trumpets wa-wa-ing in double time and the brass skyrocketing into proto-Kenton dissonances. May concludes with a stuttering stop-and-start finish reminiscent of Ellingtonian train portraits like "Daybreak Express" and "Happy Go Lucky Local," thus ending a generally blue-tinged album on an upbeat note. By the time the train winds to a halt, you know you've been on a breathtaking ride, and you walk away convinced that for all the mishegoss that went into it, you've just listened to a great album.
The overall experience clearly was not a magical one for either Ellington or Sinatra; neither, to the best of my knowledge, ever cited it as a career highlight. In his 1973 collection of reminiscences, Music Is My Mistress, Ellington praised Sinatra for his '40s campaign against racial intolerance and also for rallying to his support once in the '50s when several of his bandsmen were caught in a gambling raid that the papers threatened to blow into a big scandal. He also mentioned a "recent" occasion on which he had again surprised Sinatra on his birthday by showing up at his party and bringing his band with him. But he didn't mention Francis A. & Edward K..”
