The business of cross-over musicians interests me very much especially when somewhere in their histories you find connections with some major figure in the world of more serious music that comes as a surprise, such as "Fats" Waller having studied at one time with Leopold Godowsky. Was Sinatra a trained musician? I've often thought of him in the same league as Bing Crosby who , in spite of his mellifluous voice, marvellous style and his having "a way" with a song doesn't seem to have been able to read a note.
While not mentioning conducting, in Putting the Record Straight (Secker & Warburg 1981), John Culshaw provides an appraisal of Sinatra, whom he met in New York, which suggests a wider musicality:
"Over the years I fear I have frequently offended academics by recommending a study of Sinatra's style to students who asked questions about phrasing, emphasis and legato in a vocal line. Sinatra never had much of a voice as such, but what he did with what he had provided a lesson which no student of the voice could afford to ignore. In particular, his Capitol recording called Close to You , made with the Hollywood String Quartet and various British émigrés such as Reginald Kell on the clarinet and Arthur Cleghorn on the flute, showed precisely how he could transform material which in other hands sounded insignificant."
I have a vinyl album, "The Man I Love"..."Peggy Lee sings, Frank Sinatra conducts, the arrangements are by Nelson Riddle" where the sleeve note states "In his album 'Tone poems of Color' he (Sinatra) displayed impressive skill as the conductor of purely instrumental music." Well, some of us older ones will remember Danny Kaye gesticulating wildly in front of various top-rank orchestras without appearing to know exactly what he was doing....but Sinatra ? The accompaniments on the album are quite sensitively handled and I began to wonder what particular accomplishments Sinatra had to achieve such results. Was Nelson Riddle the "eminence grise" in the recording studio that the musicians were actually following ?
Perhaps some of the experts in the field of lighter music who post here occasionally might know the answer.
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