Sinatra's notorious "phrasing" was at the high point in the Nelson Riddle period ("Song for Young Lovers," "In the Wee Small Hours of the Night"). The Vegas period, when he began to loosen up his phrasing even more, adding extra words to the lines of a lyric, becomes too "mannered." Those mannerisms inspired every bad retro faux Sinatra singer since. What's great about the Nelson Riddle era albums is that they are almost straight--but not quite. The jazz dimension is not exaggerated. Yet the phrasing departs just enough from the expected pattern to be cool, swinging, and tasteful. Very slight hesitations or accelerandos are very effective. After Vegas he just camped it up intolerably, and kept on doing it for years afterwards. I don't think he ever recovered. When you extend that pause just a little more, then it become an "effect," a mannerism, a ghastly portamento.

As for NR himself, I will never actively *like* those arrangements. I think they are fitting, historically appropriate and all that. They conger up a period and a definite ambience. They are relatively tasteful, for that period, but they are too much of their period, for me, whereas Frank's singing on them is more timeless, purer in a way. (Though usually it is easier to achieve that effect of purity in instrumentals rather than in vocals.)

I remember variety shows when I was a kid with awful singers like Perry Como and Sammy Davis, or groups like the King Family. Into the early seventies they still had that awful music on t.v. a lot.

Not necessarily in this order, but

Rodgers and Hart, George and Ira Gershwin, Duke Ellington and Billy Stayhorn, Harold Arlen, Cole Porter, Johnny Green, Johnny Mercer, Irving Berlin. Jerome Kern, Fats Waller, Dorothy Fields, Rodgers and Hammerstein...

What can I say, I'm a sucker for a good song. It's just one of those thiings, just one of those marvelous things, a trip to the moon on gossamer wings. A foggy day in London town.. A piano tinkling in the next apartment, those stumbling things that told you what my heart meant. Someone to watch over me.

I never thought much of moonlight skies, I never winked back at fireflies. The way you wear your hat. The way you sip your tea. The way we danced till three. A fine romance. You say tomato and I say tomahto. Suddenly I saw polkdots and moonbeams. I'm going to sit right down and write a letter and make believe it came from you. I'm a sentimental sap that's all, what's the use of trying not to fall. Holding hands at midnight, neaht the moonlit sky, It's nice work if you can get it and you can get it if you try. It's the tender trap. Tangerine, with her lips of flame. In the wee small hours of the morning. East of the sun and west of the moon, and then I saw the midnight sun. It's moonlight in Vermont and Autumn in New York, April in Paris. I'll remember April and be glad.

I bought you violets for your furs. I get no kick from cocaine. I can't get started with you.

All of me, why not take all of me. Can't you see, I'm no good without you. You got the part that once was my heart so why not take all of me.

Purity and depth.

Much as I like the Great American Songbook, I like the songs better without the words, ultimately. Compare Miles to Sinatra on "It Never Entered My Mind." I like Sinatra's version too, but... It's not like the lyricists were unskilled, but that the lyrics tell you what the song is supposed to mean, and I prefer a purely non-verbal music. I want to provide my own subtext. Miles has to be considered the best "singer" of ballads ever, having found a way to leave out the words of "Surrey with Fringe on Top" or "If I were a Bell."

I do like "A piano tinkling in the next apartment / those stumbling words that told you what my heart meant / A fairground's painted swings / These foolish things / Remind me of you." That's got to be one of the best rhymes ever.

***

As for depth, I think specialists are better generalists than "generalists" are. In other words, people who have specialized narrowly in something end up also having broader knowledge than those who set out to have broad knowledge but without specializing. I have only a few, "narrow" interests, but I tend to pursue these interests "to the bottom" and end up knowing a lot about other things in the process. Since I've lived long enough to have more than a few such interests (not interests, passions is a better word, my friend Bob Basil would point out), depth has created its own form of breadth.

So narrow specialization is not the enemy of broad knowledge after all. If I'm ignorant of a lot of things, that's just because I haven't specialized in them yet.