In a world where uncertainty prevails, one certainty is that if it’s Sunday, Your Survival Guy and Gal will be playing Frank Sinatra. There’s a reason his songs are still good today, and he is certainly a national treasure. Will Friedwald writes of Ol’ Blue Eyes in The Wall Street Journal:
In the 2025 film “Blue Moon,” the character Richard Rodgers (played by Andrew Scott) asks a pointed question of a young woman (Elizabeth Weiland, played by Margaret Qualley). “Maybe you can explain to me . . . why exactly the young girls scream over Sinatra?” The scene takes place in 1943, at a moment in Frank Sinatra’s actual evolution when he was just beginning his lifelong mission to demonstrate the enduring artistic viability of what he was almost singlehandedly defining as the Great American Songbook. As it happened, Rodgers himself would be among the major beneficiaries of that effort.
Roughly a dozen years after the events depicted in “Blue Moon,” Sinatra and his greatest collaborator, the storied arranger-conductor Nelson Riddle, would release two albums that completely transformed the relationship of jazz to that American songbook: “In the Wee Small Hours” (1955)—which contains definitive renditions of no less than three songs by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart—and “Songs for Swingin’ Lovers” (1956), which has just been reissued in a deluxe 70th-anniversary audiophile vinyl edition in Blue Note’s Tone Poet series. Both albums—the first in slow torchy ballads, the second in fast, swinging numbers—show how the improvisational spirit of jazz was the linchpin keeping the major works of Rodgers, George Gershwin, Cole Porter and their colleagues fresh and vital from generation to generation.
With “Songs for Swingin’ Lovers,” Sinatra and Riddle were, in effect, trying something very specific. Up to this point in mainstream American popular music, there had essentially been two ways to sing virtually any song: You could take it slowly and romantically, often in rubato (or out of tempo entirely), or fast and rhythmically. And generally when you did the latter, as when the mighty Louis Armstrong sang “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love,” you took a ballad and turned it into a swing number, in the process sacrificing any romantic feeling of the text.
Action Line: Like wine, some things get better with age. This is true in Frank Sinatra’s case. What are you listening to on Sunday? Email me at ejsmith@yoursurvivalguy.com and click here to subscribe to my free monthly Survive & Thrive letter.
