Frank Sinatra
The Voice

THE REVIEW

1955. Bill Haley has just recorded "Rock around the clock," Chuch Berry invents the hit "Johnny B. Goode" and Elvis Presley is about to become famous thanks to Sun Records. It is the era of stars and stripes rock'n roll, the domination of music over words, the birth of a genre.

Despite this incredible musical upheaval, a second album by a young actor (already an Oscar winner) named Frank Sinatra is released in America (and later in Europe), a great crooner and enormous prophet of anti-rock'n roll, able, with just a few vocalizations, to hit the heart and disarm any listener (he will be called "The Voice" and no epithet was ever more fitting!). The album is aptly titled "The Voice" and is perhaps, despite the great commercial success of the mid-Sixties, the most beautiful record (certainly the most exciting) among all those recorded by Uncle Frank.

It is a sublime, sweet work, never shouted: Frank sings gracefully, in an almost persuasive manner, and articulates each letter and syllable with seriousness and precision. It is an exceptional concentrate of music and words, a crooner capable of shifting, with extreme ease, from blues to swing, from pop to jazz. Effective and charismatic, Sinatra manages to capture a good chunk of an audience that perhaps, given the popular love rock'n roll is receiving, would never have wanted to listen to such a light and elegant album. Remarkable, besides Frank's voice, is also the entire musical ensemble (drums, brass, piano) which seems to provide a background to powerful and beautiful songs, but which instead is a dominant part of this perfect (and, alas, very rare) union between music and words, syllables and melody, lightness and elegance. "The Voice" is a fabulous record which is now out of print (except for unlikely reissues), that should nonetheless be recovered from the cellars and depths of memory.

Exceptionally light pieces alternate with complex, dissectible compositions: "I don't know why," "Paradise," "Laura," "Fools rush in," "That old black magic." Also excellent is "Lover," brilliantly arranged by George Siravo (an Italian-American close friend of Frank Sinatra). Above all, however, stands the famous "Over the rainbow," a deadly swinging masterpiece, fully entering music history (it boasts an infinite number of quotes and imitations). It is perhaps the only track where Sinatra improvises as a singer, and he does it very well (it would perhaps be fair to describe Frank Sinatra as a crooner rather than a singer, at least in his typical sense). It's worth remembering that all the tracks present in "The Voice" are in reality compositions predating 1955. "Over the rainbow," for example, dates back to 1945, while "(I got a woman crazy for me) She's funny that way" is a very old track dated 1944, revitalized by Sinatra himself a few years later. At the time of "The Voice" Sinatra was a perfection maniac: a sublime curator of any composition and any musical score, Sinatra was for many years the emblem of musical perfection. "The Voice" is a perfect record, practically magnificent, with no smudges or banalities. Perfection and precision that Sinatra, unfortunately, will dismantle starting from the very early Sixties when, thanks to not impeccable hits like "Stranger in the night" and the pompous "My Way," he risks inevitably collapsing his own myth and, at the same time, his own monument.

For now, Sinatra is just a bit of a grown-up bad boy, clean and decent, tangled up with the mafia (no point in denying it) but with a fundamental and remarkable merit: knowing how to sing even without truly being a singer one hundred percent. And this is also how champions are recognized.