jason from volo wrote: Fri Jun 18, 2021 1:51 pmEDIT: stupid NYT subscription... sorry about that

M.H wrote: Fri Jun 18, 2021 7:46 am Also, a related story.

My grandfather ran a pub in Central London in the 50s and 60s. Living above the pub, long days, 7 days a week, that kind of affair. Not the most refined man, but loves cinema and Frank Sinatra. Manages to score tickets to see the great man at the Royal Albert Hall and has his first night off in however many years. Proceeds to get so drunk and over-excited that he keeps yelling "The king! The king is here!" when Frank takes the stage.

After one song Frank stops the show and asks security to kick my grandfather out. No compromise, no conversation. Get this guy out or the show doesn't continue. Grandfather is ejected from the venue and wanders back home, totally crushed. He couldn't listen to any of Sinatra's records ever again.

Ian Penman wrote:In the 1998 Arena documentary The Voice of the Century, Sinatra talks about how he first learned to sing by listening to horn players ‘and how they breathe’, the way certain jazz musicians can make us feel a melody as something both impossibly fragile and finally unbreakable. He mentions Tommy Dorsey again (‘I may be the only singer who ever took vocal lessons from a trombone’), and Ben Webster (one of the first acts showcased on Sinatra’s own Reprise label). But a third influence is more notable, and an indication of just how deeply jazz was lodged in the young singer’s soul: the tenor saxophonist Lester Young. Young was Billie Holiday’s musical other half, a quiet innovator and, ultimately, a rather tragic figure. In life and music the dandyish Young pushed softly against the macho grain: he could be dainty, impossibly sweet and tender, almost defenceless. His musical tone was airy, elusive, a musical braille. Towards the end of his life, so the story goes, ‘Prez’ (as Holiday dubbed him) would sit in his cheap hotel room and robotically drink and stare out into the New York air and play Sinatra records over and over again.

Ian Penman wrote:I've always found​ Sinatra most seductive, and most disquieting, the softer and more liquidly rapt he gets. The breakthrough work for me, the first Sinatra LP I truly madly fell for, was Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim (1967; fallen for circa 1983): one of the quietest albums ever made and – appropriately enough, given its shoreline feel – one of my own Desert Island discs. Ten songs, 28’05”, voice never raised above a murmur: utter perfection. A music barely there, like pollen on a summer breeze, the drowsy strings not slathered all over everything, but coming and going like midnight optimism. Sinatra sings lines like ‘tall and tan and young and lovely’ – all these clicky, tricky consonants like soldiers on guard duty – and yet when you recall his voice it’s a soft, uncurling wave.

sparky wrote: Sun Jun 20, 2021 3:57 am ^I've been mesmerised on-and-off by the Jobim record since this thread spurred me to dig it out. I even like the "bonus" 11 minutes of them recording "The Girl From Ipanema" over several takes. He begins with the exhortation to "...don't run away fellas with the tempo, hold it down, let her settle down... because we got a gang of words..." I like that last phrase.