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The Great Jazz and Pop Vocal Albums: Songs for Swingin' Lovers

Songs for Swingin' Lovers

Will Friedwald, author of The Great Jazz and Pop Vocal Albums, is exploring some of the finest recordings of the 20th century on The Jonathan Channel. This week he discusses Songs for Swingin' Lovers.

Will Friedwald:

Alright! “Songs for Swingin’ Lovers.” I think this album is particularly significant for Sinatra because this is the album that really sort of announces the comeback, the resurgence, the revival. It's 2 years after “From Here to Eternity,” so he's already in that mode, but I think it really captures that moment for Sinatra in terms of his own outlook, on his own career, on his own life, and I think it's significant that the album that came before it, “In The Wee Small Hours,” is, that's him putting to bed, saying goodbye, to the earlier phase of his life, his career, his marriage to Ava Gardner, that relationship. I think he's talking about all that in “In The Wee Small Hours,” and then, that's a sad album, that's a very melancholy album, that's an album of great ballads and torch songs, and absolutely heartrending.

And then he turns around and now that that period is finished, with “Songs for Swingin’ Lovers,” he’s announcing that he’s back in a whole new way. He’s starting this whole new moment in his life. It’s a swingin’ moment, it’s a lively moment, it’s a jazzy moment. Although, ironically enough, “In The Wee Small Hours” is as much a jazz album as “Swingin' Lovers", but “Swingin’ Lovers,” it's just a much more swingin’, as the title says, it's much more jazzy, and overt, and jumping, and huge, and danceable. He's sort of shifting gears in this very dramatic, major way, and I think that the crux of “Songs for Swingin’ Lovers” is that he means the title very literally. It's not just a marketing phrase. He's taking, for the most part these are love songs that, like “I've Got You Under My Skin,” that he is putting a beat to. He’s taking a song that's already romantic and he's making it rhythmic as well, and in doing so he's still keeping the romantic parts. It's still erotic, it’s still sensual. You still think about, you know, these erotic thoughts while Sinatra’s singing. But at the same time, it’s danceable, and it's jazzy, and it's swinging, and it's up there and nobody had ever really done that before. When Louis Armstrong sang something like “I Can't Give You Anything But Love,” it was perceived as swinging and fun and great, but nobody really thought of that as romantic. For Sinatra to be able to do both at the same time was a real breakthrough, and to me that launches, and it's very, very early in the history of the 12 inch album, that really is one of the things that drives pop albums, and what drives a whole school of singing, especially among the male singers. This idea that you could be a romantic crooner, who's at the same time singing with a beat. That had never really been done before. Even in the music of Bing Crosby. He’s doing one or the other, he’s not very often doing both. It opened the floodgates for male popular singers in particular, women too, and for pop albums in that period, for the duration of the pop album, especially over the next ten years or so. So, if there’s one album in this book that’s an absolute landmark, it’s really “Songs for Swingin’ Lovers.”

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I think it’s super significant that he opens with “You Make Me Feel So Young.” Now remember, this is right after “In The Wee Small Hours,” he recorded it within a few months of “In The Wee Small Hours,” and “In The Wee Small Hours,” he's saying goodbye. He's letting one phase of his life end, so it's about a death, so to speak. Mitch Miller, who's not somebody that can be accused of being a Sinatra sycophant, pointed out that with “From Here to Eternity” Sinatra was letting his old self die. When he did that death scene as Maggio in the movie, it was very symbolic, and it had great ramifications for Sinatra’s actual career, for people to watch him die onscreen.

Mitch said it was like a penance for all the sins he’d committed in his earlier life. So, with “You Make Me Feel So Young,” it is literally a rebirth, and the lyrics are very, very, specifically about this notion of a rebirth. It is about love empowering you and making you feel young again. “You Make Me Feel So Young:” It's not I am so young, but I feel so young. So, this is the perfect way to start not only this album, but this whole new phase, this whole new trend in record making, this whole new kind of music, with this idea of feeling young. It's also incredibly important that Sinatra sings that line, “there are songs to be sung, bells to be rung, and songs to be sung.” I think that had incredible significance for him: he's telling you what he's going to do, he’s going to be young and he's going to sing all these songs and that’s exactly what he does. So, I think it's a really earth-shattering significance that he's opening this album with the song about being young and about going forward and creating music and singing other songs because that's exactly the career path that he chooses to follow.

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Now, side B opens with “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” When we talk about this notion of “swinging lovers”, this song is really the crux of that, because if you listen to the original version by Cole Porter, it's from a musical called “Born To Dance,” circa 1936. In that film, it's done sort of like a slow, romantic Bolero, it's sort of in the same vein as “Begin the Beguine.” It’s got this exotic beat. It's definitely a torch song, it is not a swinging song by a long shot. But it's got this like I say, a bolero, kind of quasi-Spanish, quasi-Pan-American kind of a beat to it. The way that Sinatra and Riddle heard it in their heads, as a swinging number, it's hard to figure out where that idea could have possibly have come from, but we do know some of the logistics of it, some of the specifics of it. Riddle had heard of a record by Stan Kenton, “23 Degrees North, 82 Degrees West.” So, he heard this record by Stan Kenton, that had been written for the Kenton Band by Bill Russo, who was, like Riddle, a former trombonist, and that gave him the idea to use this Afro-Cuban beat behind it. It became the definitive example of Sinatra taking a song that had been a love song, had been a torch song, putting a beat to it, and yet still having it retain the Romantic qualities, as well as the rhythmic qualities. The idea that you could be a swingin’ lover in the most literal sense. And that is the song that created the whole swingin’ lovers movement. This is the archetype for almost everything that Bobby Darin did, that Steve Lawrence did, that Jack Jones did, that a million others did, and they took that idea: that you could swing a Love Song, and have it be both rhythmic and romantic at the same time.

“I've Got You Under My Skin” was immediately one of the all-time Sinatra signatures that he sang at a zillion concerts, and the trombone solo in the middle of by Milt Bernhart, coincidentally a veteran of the Stan Kenton Orchestra, that in itself became iconic. It’s this fascinating balance between tension and release, this idea of holding back, this idea of pushing forward. You notice Sinatra never really screams, he never really raises his voice, he never really belts in it, he lets the orchestra do that for him. The way he interacts with the arrangement, the way he let’s the song sort of envelope him, he doesn't have to scream, he doesn't have to blow his cool. Yet he conveys this incredible excitement and energy. All without ever having to essentially raise his voice, without ever having to get his voice bigger to the point where you would think it would need to be to convey that level of emotion.

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Well, I happen to love, maybe this is just a personal favorite, the second song, right after “You Make Me Feel So Young,” the second song on side one, is “It Happened In Monterey.” And people don't realize what a radical treatment that is, the way they would have in 1956, when you first heard it, because if you knew that song at all, you know that it was an ersatz Mexican Waltz. “It happened in Monterey, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, in Old Mexico!” and it doesn’t sound anything like what Sinatra and Riddle did with it. Most notably, they put it into 4/4, where it had never been before. They made it into a mellow, swinging number, completely different from any trace of its original history, and Riddle wrote the most brilliant introduction for it with these flutes playing this multi-harmonic intro that defies description.

“Songs for Swingin’ Lovers” is the most pronounced example of Riddle writing astonishing introductions and countermelodies. Every track on the album has this amazing counter-melody. What he writes in between the tunes, and leading up into the tune, in and around the tone, is just as good as the melody itself, in almost every case. And just the absolute background of the tune, what’s under Sinatra as he’s singing, is very, very secondary, it’s in the little fills, it’s in the intros, it’s in and around Sinatra that Riddle is truly at his most creative. And this is the most pronounced example of an album where where if you heard the record even 2 or 3 times, and most of us have grown up with it, of course, but if you're just even lightly familiar with it, you know what tune you're going to hear just from the first five or six notes of the introduction. That's how distinct Riddle’s arrangements are: they really have this incredibly unique thumbprint. That’s an album where, even you haven't memorized it, you know where it’s leading up to, what these intros are leading up to, even though the introductions don’t quote the song itself. They are totally original to Riddle.

Erroll Garner has that same sense in his introductions, the same adventurous sort of spirit, the difference being that Garner, being as original in his own way as Riddle, actually was trying to pull a fast one on you: he did not want you to guess what song was coming next from the introduction. He never would repeat them in a way that you could ever predict. But Nelson, these arrangements are just so brilliant, and you always know what's going to come just from the opening few notes.