A series of live radio broadcasts took place in Los Angeles from 1953 to July 1955, each episode fifteen minutes long and twice a week. Frank Sinatra was recovering from a career disaster that looked like a living death. The road from teen idol to full-time artist is not easy, and this series of live radio recordings, To Be Perfectly…Frank exposes the bridge from his hell to a more comfortable spot in popular music's commercial and social world. It is also essential and superb music.
Just September Song alone is worth the entire album because his voice and piano are like a world turning into seasons, and he examines his emotions against the singer’s will as if there were a nip in the air. Listening to his words is always the attraction, but sitting here, I focus on the voice alone. It is more like a horn being played than a sound coming from a human’s body. Since listening to Lester Young, Sinatra’s voice blends into that song, and he, too (like The Prez), is dragged by the melody as if being pulled by a lover or two to the darker part of that room.
The pianist Bill Miller is probably the musician who worked the longest with Sinatra. They started working together in 1951 and continued until 1978, then again in 1985, until the end of Sinatra’s involvement with music. On these radio programs with Sinatra, one can hear his contribution to the sound, either as a lone pianist with a voice or with the band. The arranger, the arrangement, and the musicians contribute a lot to a Sinatra recording, and Frank never shies away from such exceptional skills in his music-making. But hearing these live recordings, there is an intimacy that is like a space only contained by Frank and his small combo here.
At this point, it doesn’t matter if one likes Sinatra, but he is a presence in modern music that cannot be realistically ignored. I think every singer will have to think of Sinatra when they form their vocal cords into a song. And to be perfectly Frank…one should never turn their back to greatness.
Down below are a few of his radio shows:
He was the soundtrack for my early life. Barely out of my teens I was teaching music in Lusk Wyoming and listening to “Only The Lonely” and dreaming of other things, unreadable at that time. Thanks Tosh.
His presence is huge, he was the very first primal pop star (subsequent to Bing of course and prior to Presley)