Today while perusing the Internet, I came across The Single Dumbest Sentence Ever Written. There may be others that challenge it, hell, maybe I’ve written worse, but I submit to you, today I found the one.
The other night my wife grumbled about Christmas shopping remaining to be done, mainly for me because I had not provided any ideas. Since the pandemic, I have been playing my keyboard a lot and I decided I would help my wife out and look at a songbook publishing site to see if there was one I might like to play. I came across a Frank Sinatra songbook for piano, SINATRA STANDARDS FOR PIANISTS.
First, some background. I was born in 1961. At home, music was constantly in the background, played either on a phonograph or on the radio. My parents’ preference of music in those days was the sounds of the big bands of the ‘40s and ‘50s. Over time, there were a few voices that I grew to recognize and enjoy, Tony Bennett, Perry Como, and of course Frank Sinatra. I vividly remember a couple of Sinatra songs as being the first songs I ever loved, “Strangers in the Night” and “Summer Wind”.
As I grew, my brother, who was 6 years older than me, began to influence my taste in music, introducing me to the sounds of the ‘60s with the likes of The Beatles, Buffalo Springfield, etc. He though had also become a huge Sinatra fan and we listened to tons of Sinatra records from the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s, and by then, the ‘70s. (To this day, The Main Event, a live television broadcast from Madison Square Garden in October 1974, remains one of my favorite albums.)
“Ever wonder what songs identified with Frank Sinatra would sound like in the same arrangements, but with a piano substituted for the voice?” [emphasis added]
UM, NO, HELL NO! The answer is contained in the last 2 words of the sentence, Frank Sinatra= the voice.
