Frank Sinatra

Frank Sinatra (1915-1998) was the leading male pop singer of the mid-twentieth century. He began his career as a singer with the big bands of Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, at a time when the main attraction was the band and singers, like band musicians, were subordinate to the bandleader. In the early 1940s he left Dorsey's band and began to record as a solo artist, in the process changing pop music history by attracting a young female audience, then called "bobby-soxers", who reacted to him with the hysteria which in later decades would be the response to the male stars of rock'n'roll and pop. "Sinatramania" continued through the 1940s, but towards the end of that decade his career went into a temporary decline.

In the early 1950s he made film and radio appearances, but it was only when he signed with Capitol Records in 1953 that his fortunes began to revive. He made a series of albums for the label, using the LP format to assemble thematic collections of songs dealing with adult emotions rather than teenage romance, crafted by experienced songwriters from Tin Pan Alley and Broadway and arranged by the likes of Nelson Riddle and Billy May. SInatra was not only gifted with a vocal technique which drew praise from jazz musicians and opera singers, but in his film work had shown himself to be a talented actor. In his Capitol albums he projected the archetypal Sinatra image, comparable in some ways to the screen persona of the actor Humphrey Bogart - a combination of wary world-weariness and romanticism - which proved highly attractive to the large audience which bought his records and attended his concerts. The 1950s, however, also saw the rise of rock'n'roll, a music which Sinatra despised for what he saw as its primitive and adolescent nature, in contrast to the hard-won sophistication of his own music.

He continued to enjoy success both on record and in films into the 1960s, but found himself on one side of the generation gap which was widening dramatically. While his daughter Nancy had chart hits with the help of songwriter and producer Lee Hazelwood, his son Frank Sinatra Jr. followed in his father's footsteps by performing "standards" in nightclubs and indulging in diatribes against 1960s pop music - but Sinatra Jr. never had a best-selling record. Father and daughter topped the UK and US charts in 1967 with the duet "Somethin' Stupid" yet Sinatra's career once again seemed in decline and he retired in 1971, only to return in the first of a series of comebacks in 1973. At the time, Ralph J. Gleason, the San Francisco jazz and rock critic and elder statesman of Rolling Stone magazine, wrote a column about the event, saying that he could remember a time when "Frankie" had come to San Francisco and was considered "hip". This remark was greeted with hilarity in some circles - an indication of how out of fashion Sinatra had become. But this was to change in the years which followed.

tbc.....


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Sessions

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 * Song title / Song Title / Song Title / Song Title
 * Song title / Song Title / Song Title / Song Title

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Other Shows Played
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 * DD Month YYYY: Song (single/album) Label