[Dixielandjazz] Maybe a litle OT - Frank Sinatra: September of My Years - Wall Street Journal, December 30, 2015

[Robert Ringwald]

Perhaps this is a little off-topic. But I am sure that, along with me, there are closet Sinatra fans on DJML.



Frank Sinatra: September of My Years  
    Sinatra and Reflections as Days Dwindle Down


by Allen Barra

Wall Street Journal, December 30, 2015


Legend has it that 50 years ago this spring Frank Sinatra walked into a Hollywood recording studio and asked, “Who’s got the ball game on?” Supposedly, Sinatra, a big fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers, particularly their ace lefty, Sandy Koufax, wanted to be finished in time for the first pitch at Dodger Stadium.


Sinatra was just being jaunty; the Dodgers weren’t even playing that day. In fact, he was all business that afternoon, and the business was the recording of an album, “September of My Years,” that would be released before his 50th birthday on Dec. 12. There was much at stake. In 1961 he had told an interviewer, “Four years from now I’ll be 50 years old. By then, I’ll have had it as... a singer.”


In 1965, the Beatles would dominate album sales, Bob Dylan would meld folk music to electric guitars, and the Rolling Stones would rip up the airwaves with “Satisfaction.” Frank Sinatra mattered little to a new generation, and not at all to me. As Wilfrid Sheed put it, “The pop-culture train seemed to be pulling out, leaving him alone on the track.”


Like most followers of pop music who came of age in the ’60s, I had no idea at the time that Sinatra had created the concept album years before -- some say with his 1955 release “In the Wee Small Hours.” On such classic recordings as “Songs for Swingin’ Lovers!” (1956) and “Come Fly With Me” (1958), the numbers, though not written by Sinatra, were unified in mood, theme and arrangement.


This was to be a different kind of Sinatra album. On this one the music didn’t swing. The singer isn’t brash or upbeat; he is vulnerable and reflective, musing over a lifetime of experience. The songs on “September of My Years” were selected to express decades of sorrow, joy and coming to terms with life’s compromises, not exactly topics of the zeitgeist of popular music in the mid-’60s.


Gordon Jenkins wasn’t the favorite arranger of most Sinatra buffs; his string arrangements were “too lush, too schmaltzy,” as Sinatra admirer Pete Hamill once said to me. But Sinatra was in charge, and if “September of My Years” was schmaltz, then schmaltz was what the Chairman of the Board wanted.


Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn, authors of many of Sinatra’s greatest swing tunes, wrote an uncharacteristically pensive song, “The September of My Years,” to set the tone for the album. But the song the album is best remembered for -- and, perhaps, the signature song of Sinatra’s entire career -- was “It Was a Very Good Year.” It had first been recorded in 1961, sung by the Kingston Trio. Sinatra instantly decided that with a new orchestral chart he could make it his own. Frank’s version won a Grammy for best vocals in 1966.


For me, the album’s most memorable track is its closing number, the exquisite “September Song” by Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson, in which Sinatra challenged his own two earlier recordings of the song, the first in 1946, when his voice was younger and stronger. By 1965, years of Jack Daniel’s and unfiltered Camels had taken their toll on his pipes (as Sinatra referred to his vocal cords), but experience in the form of more polished style and technique carried him through.


More than in any other song he ever recorded, Sinatra’s greatest talent is in evidence here: He made no attempt to force emotion into the lyrics, as the lounge singers who still ape him try to do. In “September Song,” as he proved for all time, his genius was in finding the emotion in the lyrics. When Sinatra sings Anderson’s “The days dwindle down to a precious few / September, November,” he holds the note at the end of November as if an ellipses followed, contemplating a future that he will be living all too soon. In the next line he stops and sings in a much different tone, directed at the object of his emotions: “And these few precious days I’ll spend with you.” There is heartbreak and then contentment in his voice.


“September of My Years” isn’t the classic Sinatra of Sinatra aficionados like comedian and singer Seth MacFarlane, whose new album “No One Ever Tells You” harkens back to the Sinatra of the ’50s. But from my own experience, I would say that “September of My Years” is the favorite Sinatra album of people from my generation, for whom Bob Dylan was the spokesman, or the album that draws us back in time to Sinatra’s rich and vast oeuvre.


We didn’t know that Dylan had been there years before. In his 2004 memoir, “Chronicles, Volume One,” he wrote about listening to Sinatra while staying at a friend’s in Greenwich Village in the early ’60s: “I used to play the phenomenal ‘Ebb Tide’... It never failed to fill me with awe... when Frank sang that song, I could hear everything in his voice -- death, God, and the universe, everything.”

  When it came to Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan was, as with so many other things, years ahead of us. -30-

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