Unbearably Bright


Today’s formative-album replay: Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely. Program music is by definition instrumental, right? Think of Ravel and water, Beethoven and nature, Strauss and orgasm—these models of the form are about non-verbal music conjuring extra-musical scenes and stuff, about using chords as colors and instruments as paints on the canvas of the listener's mind.

But what if you add vocals to the program? No, I don't mean bird calls or assorted animal noises. Is it a kind of cheating if a singer adds words to the palette? How about if that singer is also acting the hell out of those words? Say he's intoning the lyric "hang on to each caress" with a vocal timbre and phrasing that is spine-tinglingly close to the sensation of a lingering human touch, over an orchestra that is embracing him back, or singing about "teardrops hanging on a string of dreams" in a way that makes you positively see that dripping filament...

That is close to the effect of this entire mesmeric record from 1958, which sounds for all the world like someone had the out-of-the-box idea: "What if Debussy made a blues album?" 
The teasing chromaticism of many the melodies in this mix of standards and bepoke originals is one key to the French flavor. But the Gallic signature is chiefly in Riddle's exotically harmonized charts, which have his signature pillowy strings, of course, but are most distinctly characterized here by the winds, which sigh and whir and flurry around Sinatra's voice like splashes of "La Mer." There's scarcely a track here in which the orchestra begins in the song's home key, let alone the tempo it will settle into, and very few that don't end in various kinds of shimmering fadeouts, as when the lyric "'Scuse me while I disappear" at the end of "Angel Eyes" is followed by chiming piano, a few notes on a harp, and a flute trill, like a customer leaving through a beaded curtain. Indeed the model for most of these arrangements is in the album's least characteristic song, thematically, i.e., the only one without a lonesome ending, "Ebb Tide," which swells up from a small eddy to a passionate wave-crash, then retreats.

Almost all the songs have that quiet-loud-quiet build to them, to a fault: This record is a lot to take at one sitting, I'll admit. And there are moments that border on self-parody, as when Riddle and Sinatra turn the boxy old blues harmonies of Gordon Jenkins's "Good-Bye" into absurdly stately symphonic gestures. But the mask of tragedy they've chosen for this downbeat song cycle never breaks, and the performance ultimately holds together. It may make you smile, as I did, to hear that Sinatra sings the "a-hooey-da-hooey" of "Blues in the Night" with the same bone-deep conviction as he sings "You are love!" in "Ebb Tide." It is also a mark of his overwhelming, fine-grained commitment to this material.

I can't say enough about Sinatra's musicianship here, which is inextricably tied to what can only be called his acting. He is both making breathtakingly precise, expressive technical musical choices and is entirely in the moment with the roiling emotions of these songs' lyrics and situations. An analogy to the best opera singers and musical actors is not amiss: Like Audra McDonald or Dawn Upshaw, he makes every word and note count, and signify, all that it can. He was not always so discerning or convicted with his material or his interpretive gifts, and there's a lot of his music I can take or leave. But on Only the Lonely Sinatra is revealed as a master interpretive musician on par with the best we've ever had: Yo-Yo Ma, Billie Holiday, Django Reinhardt, Roy Clark, k.d. lang. In this guise he is so far from the louche, lyric-goosing Vegas stereotype he would become in the popular imagination that it's jarring. The moments that follow the broken-down fadeout of "One for My Baby" end the record with one of the loudest silences I've ever heard.

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