Ill Wind by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler, performed by Frank Sinatra
‘My man Frank’, Lester Young called him. Later it was ‘Frankie boy’. For ‘Prez’, the supreme tenor saxophonist after Coleman Hawkins, Sinatra was the ideal singer, so an endorsement like that bears the stamp of royal approval.
It’s an odd duck who doesn’t get Sinatra. As the posters on a hundred saloons used to proclaim, ‘it’s Frank’s world - we just live in it’. The lad from Hoboken was the supreme interpreter of great songs, an accomplished actor, and in his peak years the most vivid symbol of popular culture. It was the voice of a lifetime, said Bing Crosby, who added somewhat ruefully: ‘my lifetime’.
Crosby, of course, was paired with Sinatra in Cole Porter’s High Society, where they shared Did You Evah?, and its ho-ho-hopening line: ‘I have heard among this clan/You are called the forgotten man’. Crosby could never be forgotten. He was the first of the baritone crooners, and paved the way for others, as Sinatra acknowledged. But in 1956, when High Society hit the big screen, the younger man was the biggest star of all, and he remained the champion until his death in 1998.
His mind was foggy by then. I caught Sinatra at Radio City in New York in November 1992, when he attributed arrangements to the wrong fellow, usually Don Costa. Yet the fact that he identified the arranger is significant. Sinatra, for all his medals, was a collaborator. He made sure who had written the song, who had supplied the lyric, and the arranger who had knitted it together. No wonder musicians loved him, while noting his penchant for single takes. ‘With Frank’, went the joke, ‘you can’t afford to make the same mistake once’.
In London, recording Songs from Great Britain in 1962, Sinatra listened to different versions of a number and said ‘let’s go for that one, it’s got a nice trombone solo’. That’s the musician talking, the man who spent his prentice years in bands led by Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, who taught him how to shape and project a song. He never forgot his tutors.
Staying with Grace Kelly in Monaco, Sinatra found himself seated next to the writer Anthony Burgess at dinner. Burgess was delighted, and astonished, to hear him speak unaffectedly about Stravinsky’s mastery of the orchestra in the Firebird! Sinatra had once approached Stravinsky at a restaurant in New York, and asked for an autograph. The Russian, who was speaking to a friend, scribbled his name on a menu and handed it back, without looking up to see who had made the request.
So let’s be clear: Sinatra was a true musician, not merely a vocalist. And he lengthened his stride in the Fifties. ‘The Capitol years’ we call them, after the record company in Los Angeles which signed him, and what times they were. The first two LPs, Songs for Young Lovers and Swing Easy, revealed an artist happy to leave behind his ‘Bobbysox’ days, and those screaming female fans. Success in the hit film From Here to Eternity also helped. But it was the third Capitol disc, In The Wee Small Hours, released in April 1955, that caught him in midsummer glory. Here was a blossoming, as the voice deepened, enabling him to do justice to some magnificent songs without brass players parping every other bar.
It’s impossible to hear the records he made at that time without considering his separation from Ava Gardner, the love of his life, who proved unconquerable. After In The Wee Small Hours came two LPs which match that achievement – Only The Lonely (1958) and When No-One Cares (1959). Sinatra made many fine records but none surpassed those. No singer could.
How do you choose between them? What is ‘the best’? As a friend once said of the four Brahms symphonies, ‘my favourite is the one I’ve heard most recently’. Sinatra’s own favourite was Only The Lonely, arranged by Nelson Riddle after Gordon Jenkins became unavailable. A personal vote for the finest Sinatra performance might well go to Here’s That Rainy Day on When No-One Cares, composed by Sinatra’s pal Jimmy Van Heusen, with the lyric by Johnny Burke. The album was arranged, magnificently, by Jenkins.
Peaches galore. Angel Eyes, Goodbye, Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out To Dry, One For My Baby, Laura, The Night We Called It A Day, You Go To My Head, How Insensitive, Summer Wind, I Get Along Without You Very Well, That Old Black Magic, How Deep Is The Ocean, I’ve Got You Under My Skin…Masterpieces for all occasions. Riddle, Jenkins, Billy May and Axel Stordahl contributed with superb arrangements but Sinatra was the man on strike. In every egg a bird.
In The Wee Small Hours has been called ‘a concept album’, the concept being loss. Most popular songs, it may be said, are songs of loss, though the Gardner effect cannot be overlooked. However beautifully Sinatra covers It Never Entered My Mind and I’ll Be Around there are undertones of regret. A concept, though? No, that’s pat.
So which performance is to be? Mood Indigo, Ellington’s classic, with words by Irving Mills? Or Ill Wind, by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler? Mood Indigo, the second cut on the LP, coming after the title song, reveals the new Sinatra, while nodding to his past as the young man who stood in front of the band. Ellington, that colossus of American music, ran the best band of all. Or rather, the best bands of all, during half a century of reinvention. It’s a towering performance.
Yet I’ve gone with Ill Wind. Arlen was one of the great figures of the popular song, whose best work, with Koehler, Johnny Mercer and Ira Gershwin will last until salmon swim in the street. Besides Ill Wind Arlen and Koehler wrote Get Happy, Stormy Weather, and I’ve Got The World On A String, and the world has not withheld its thanks.
Arlen was the one songsmith in the great American tradition, even above George Gershwin, who understood the black idiom that found its more traditional expression in blues and jazz. Ill Wind is bluenote music, straddling the border it shares with the Broadway idiom, and Sinatra meets the challenge with an understanding that can only come from years of experience. How does this song go? Listen to Frank sing it.
There can be no such thing as Sinatra’s ‘best’ performance, for there are at least 50 songs worth our consideration. But In The Wee Small Hours is a decent place to start, and Ill Wind finds our champion on Mount Athos, master of all he surveys.
Hendo’s Dozen, so far.
Frank Sinatra, Ill Wind by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler
Judy Garland, Do It Again by George Gershwin and Buddy Da Sylva
Bobby Darin: Once Upon A Time, by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams.
Fred Astaire: I’m Old Fashioned; Jerome Kern and Johnny Mercer.
Lena Horne: It Could Happen to You; Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke.
Tony Bennett: I Walk A Little Faster; Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh.
Peggy Lee: Then I’ll Be Tired of You; Arthur Schwartz and Yip Harburg.