The Mojo Collection. Various Mojo Magazine
the ’58 Newport Jazz Festival, the soft summer drizzle suddenly stopped. We know from Mahalia’s stage patter that it was actually still raining at the end of the concert, but it’s testament to the truly unique spirit of her music that folks should insist some divine intervention took place. As her friend the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr commented, a voice like hers came only ‘once in a millennium’.
By 1958, Mahalia – then aged 46 – was a household name in America, following a string of crossover hits and a sensational performance on the Ed Sullivan Show two years earlier. Though she had made some recordings with Duke Ellington, she famously refused to sing pop or the blues, preferring to spread the word of the Lord through her beloved hymns and gospel music. She was far from a gospel ‘snob’, however; when musicologists from the Juilliard quizzed her about her extraordinary vocal technique in 1950, they discovered a woman who’d grown up listening to Enrico Caruso and blues queen Bessie Smith, as well as the maudlin jazz of New Orleans funeral marches and the religious music she heard in her father’s church.
At 16, Mahalia, with $100 sewn into her underclothes, left the segregation and relentless poverty of New Orleans for the northern mecca of Chicago, where she’d heard that blacks and whites could sit together on the buses. Quickly recognised in her new church as an incredible talent, she was whisked away on gospel tours and to recording sessions, ever imploring the people around her to ‘make a joyful noise unto the Lord’ and revel in the transcendental joy of religious singing. She also qualified as a beautician.
At Newport, Mahalia gave one of her finest ever performances, the rich, stirring rendition of An Evening Prayer kicking off a set of 19th century church music and ‘modern’ gospel innovations, all given a swinging jazz flavour by the backing of long-term accomplice Mildred Falls’ piano, Lilton Mitchell’s organ and Tom Bryant’s bass. (In 1946, Mahalia had been one of the first gospel artists to use a Hammond organ on her records.) Three tracks – It Don’t Cost Very Much, I’m Going To Live The Life I Sing About In My Song and Walk Over God’s Heaven – were written by her favourite gospel composer, Thomas A. Dorsey, and her familiarity and identification with the material is clear in her mesmerising interpretations.
‘I sing God’s music because it makes me feel free,’ she once said. ‘It gives me hope. With the blues, when you finish, you still have the blues.’
Frank Sinatra
Come Fly With Me
Sinatra’s first and best collaboration with Billy May.
Record label: Capitol
Produced: Voyle Gilmore
Recorded: Capitol Studios, Hollywood; autumn 1957
Released: November 1958
Chart peaks: 2 (UK) 1 (US)
Personnel: Frank Sinatra (v); Billy May (ar, conductor). Orchestra includes Alvin Stoller (d); Skits Herbert (clarinet, s)
Track listing: Come Fly With Me; Around The World; Isle Of Capri; Moonlight In Vermont; Autumn In New York; On The Road To Mandalay; Let’s Get Away From It All; April In Paris; London By Night; Brazil; Blue Hawaii; It’s Nice To Go Trav’ling
Running time: 38.46
Current CD: Capitol CAP960872
Further listening: Follow-up Come Dance With Me (1959) was doubly driving and almost as good but Come Swing With Me (1961) was contractual obligation work of an artist keen to leave Capitol. Francis A And Edward K, the 1967 May–Ellington collaboration on Reprise, however, was majestic.
Further reading: Sinatra! The Song Is You: A Singer’s Art (Will Friedwald, 1995); www.franksinatra.com
Download: iTunes
As heaven-made as the Nelson Riddle/Frank Sinatra partnership was, Frank was unwilling to be too closely identified with one arranger and turned to Billy May for his travelogue album Come Fly With Me, the first of his themed records that weren’t to do with love, loss or swingin’. Working with May was likened by Sinatra to having a ‘bucket of cold water thrown in your face’, so vibrant was the Fat Man’s presence. May was already famous for his albums of exotic orchestral work featuring trademark slurping saxes and elaborate percussion and some of that colourful stuff was imported none-too-seriously onto tracks like Isle Of Capri and Brazil, on which arranger and singer are clearly having a ball. However, May had a reputation as the most versatile arranger in Hollywood and the range of his work on this one album is proof enough. Autumn In New York and Moonlight In Vermont rank among the best Sinatra ballads ever, with their sighing-for-exotic-lands arrangements and Frank in hyperaware interpretative form while Come Fly With Me is art-swing of a very high order, from the take-off expectancy of the intro to the mysterious shimmer-in-the-clouds of the final string colour. May’s favourite was the Victor Young waltz Around The World: ‘That’s a beautiful tune, and Frank sang the shit out of it too. Boy! He’s really a good singer.’
But perhaps the most startling piece is the Rudyard Kipling-inspired On The Road To Mandalay. Banned from the UK issue of the album by Kipling’s daughter (‘How dare she?’ bitched Sinatra at a 1958 concert, ‘Of course, she drinks a little bit so we’ll forgive her’), it has a bizarre ending (‘And the dawn comes up like thunder!’) that sounds like someone has prematurely lifted the needle. Originally there was a gong followed by another half-chorus, but saxist Skits Herbert recalled that ‘Billy just kind of waved his hands to signal “Don’t say anything.” And instead of going on, Frank put on his hat and threw his coat over his shoulder, like he does, and walked out of the studio! We all laughed like mad. That was the way they put it out.’
Frank Sinatra
Sings For Only The Lonely
The greatest of Sinatra’s suicidal mood albums.
Record label: Capitol
Produced: Dave Cavanaugh
Recorded: Capitol Studios, Hollywood; May–June 1958
Released: December 1958
Chart peaks: 5 (UK) 1 (US)
Personnel: Frank Sinatra (v); Nelson Riddle (ar); Felix Slatkin (c); orchestra included Al Viola (g); Pete Condoli (t); Bill Miller (p); Gus Bivona (as); Ray Sims (tb)
Track Listing: Only The Lonely; Angel Eyes; What’s New; It’s A Lonesome Old Town; Willow Weep For Me; Goodbye; Blues In The Night; Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out To Dry; Ebb Tide; Spring Is Here; Gone With The Wind; One For My Baby
Running time: 54.35
Current CD: Capitol CAP947562 adds: Sleep Warm; Where Or When
Further listening: In The Wee Small Hours (1955); Close To You (1956)
Further reading: Sinatra! The Song Is You: A Singer’s Art by Will Friedwald (1995); www.franksinatra.com
Download: iTunes
As well as the classic mid-tempo good-time swingers Songs For Swingin’ Lovers (1955) and A Swingin’ Affair (1956), in the renaissance Capitol years Frank Sinatra had already produced a classic torch album with arranger Nelson Riddle, In The Wee Small Hours (1955), and had even dallied with arranger Gordon Jenkins on the cloying deep gloom of Where Are You? (1957). But neither quite prepared the listener for the devastating tragic-romantic impact of Only The Lonely.
Set in sweepingly dramatic late-romantic/early-impressionist orchestral textures, Sinatra the actor-singer is at his absolute peak, in control of every technical and emotional nuance, entirely