Word: sinatras
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Notes were for singing, and on the subject of music, Sinatra could write a book. He was generous to his singing contemporaries, maybe because he knew he had no serious rival, but probably too out of a genuine respect for musicianship. He would speak fondly and knowledgeably of Billie Holiday, Mabel Mercer, Tony Bennett. And if he heard you had an ear and were ready to lend one, and if the mood was right and there was a bottle of Scotch in the neighborhood, he could talk about music far into the night. "A Johnny Mercer lyric," he said once...
...would be best, of course, if you were a player, a singer, a fellow musician. But with luck and fine timing, you could also be a casual guest, a dinner companion, a colleague's spouse--even, if the furies were snoozing, a journalist. In 1988 Sinatra, the paragon of show-biz sangfroid, told Larry King, "I swear on my mother's soul, the first four or five seconds, I tremble every time I take the step and I walk out of the wing onto the stage, because I wonder if it will be there when I go for the first...
...with the Dorsey band in the early '40s, he kept on tap a voice teacher who was a former opera singer. Later on he would turn to Metropolitan Opera soprano Dorothy Kirsten and baritone Robert Merrill for pointers on technique. "He knew they knew...how to maintain the equipment," Sinatra's longtime conductor, Vincent Falcone, told writer Will Friedwald. That stuff in the whiskey tumbler he used onstage was often tea. Booze, he knew, could batter the throat...
...fame and talent, he built on them, and in the end beat time itself. Not only does his music define the time and temper of the American decades in which it was made, but his singing moves those songs out of time into something indistinct, everlasting. In Sinatra's music, there is no past tense...
...could say he was the greatest, and that's right. But that doesn't say enough. There's nothing you can call him that doesn't in some way sell him short. Except Sinatra...