Frank Sinatra's birthday Our critic pays homage to the quintessential American voice

...or to the hip, knowing fellow with the jauntily-tilted fedora in the fifties...

...but don't be surprised if Bill and Hillary find some way of crashing the party (it's election year, after all-and publicly honoring Francis Albert can't, you know, hurt...

...Forget it at least for a moment, and remember the singer...

...And Sinatra, in his two magnificent decades, the fifties and sixties, was the ideal-I'm tempted to say, predestined-voice of that great tradition...

...Somehow- I don't know any other way to say this- it shouldn't be...

...and Torme is, rather famously, not given to err on the side of humility...

...doing Sinatra's signature songs...

...Like instrumental jazz-the single greatest American achievement-it's music brought to a unique pitch of tenderness, bitterness, and sheer smartass passion...

...Some dummy is bound to call him "larger than life...

...but Ishmael was being honest...

...And Mel Torme has everything...

...He was never better...

...But the solitaire is still the solitaire...

...Frank Sinatra-Frank Sinatra!-is eighty...

...an ABC special aired December 14 with- well-everybody (Tony Bennett, Springsteen, Patti LaBelle, etc...

...As surely as Twain's or Hemingway's or Basie's, it's the American voice...

...MEDIA Frank McConnell A VERY GOOD 8O YEARS Frank Sinatra's birthday As of December 12, 1995, Frank Sinatra is eighty...

...Garcia was right...

...In those days he'd smoke a few cigarettes before a performance to slacken the vocal chords...

...And- though I would never have described myself as a Sinatra fan-the first CD I bought was, inevitably, his 1956 masterpiece, Songs for Swingin' Lovers...

...Maybe the American songbook never was...

...It's not okay for our icons (and if Sinatra isn't an icon, then it's a null set): their aging, oddly more than our own, underscores the irre-versibility of time's arrow, measures how far we've come since we first heard or saw them...

...A recovering technophobe, I bought my first CD player only in 1990...

...If Torme aligns with Sarah Vaughan, Sinatra aligns with Billie Holiday: less chops, less range, less spirit, but a truckload-no, a freight train- of soul, evident in nearly every note of those best, stunning, albums...

...Joe Williams, especially in his years with Count Basie, had a vibrant, grab-you-by-the-tie baritone and a sense of swing that Blue Eyes could only dream about...

...As are we all...

...By the fifties, Sinatra's voice had deepened, taken on a character it doesn't have in the early records...

...Novelist Ishmael Reed once said, visiting my class, that he would rather have written the lyrics to "Stardust" than any of his own books...

...Tony Bennett had, and has, cleaner pitch: notice how often, even at his grandest, Frank slides up or down to the note-that's uncertainty manifesting itself as genius...

...And he was sometimes wrong and sometimes crummy...

...Listen to Songs for Swingin' Lovers, Come Fly With Me, or any of the albums from that period...

...And he was also, for a very long shining moment, an artist who made us proud of ourselves, just for hearing him...

...Thinking about Sinatra at eighty, I've been thinking about Hopkins's "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child...

...It's okay if you get old or if I get old: we expect that, we even, bitterly, hope to...

...It's both and neither...

...or the tux-clad, increasingly portly and raspy Vegas showman...

...Not that he ever, really, had the greatest chops...

...And Frank Sinatra is eighty...

...What strikes me most about it all, though, is, as I said, the poignancy...

...And they saw the movies: from the gawky but affecting performance in On the Town to the genius of From Here to Eternity and The Man with the Golden Arm to the self-indulgent silliness of Von Ryan's Express and Dirty Dingus McGee...

...And yet underneath all the octogenarian adulation, you sense a rather unique melancholy...

...Forget the films, even the fine ones...

...Inevitably," because I could think of no other all-but-perfect single anthology of American popular song at its greatest...

...It's been called belcanto, improvisa-tional singing, and Sprachgesang, literally talking-song...

...Miles Davis, who never erred that way, said once in DownBeat that he learned how to play ballads by listening to the way Sinatra broke up his phrases...

...Wrong: as with Cagney or Ellington or Astaire, we cherish him because his career is part of the topography of our lives...

...And Nelson Riddle, an arranger straight from God, knew just how to place it, like a solitaire diamond on an onyx ring: wickedly clever riffs by the woodwinds above and the brass below the singer's range, and with plenty of space for him to do what he did better than anyone-turn song into exalted, inspired speech...

...It's lovely that he's still with us, that he actually carried the ball all the way downfield, and that he did it-the phrase will be repeated nauseatingly in weeks to come-his way...

...After the explosion that was rock 'n' roll, we're only beginning to realize that American song in the thirties and forties was and is one of the supreme accomplishments of our culture, that the work of Gershwin, Porter, Arlen, Berlin, and Rodgers and Hart shines with as great a brilliance as, say, the sonnets of Wyatt, Surrey, and Sidney...

...ift survived it all...

...It was a kindova baritone, a sortova low tenor-a bastard voice, like that bastard horn the tenor saxophone, half-woodwind and half-brass, and just the thing for that bastard genre, American song...

...Chops all gone, concentration shot, waiting- let's say it-for what W. C. Fields called "the Fellow in the satin slippers...

...The celebrations, the hype, the ha-giography are in place: deluxe CD sets from Reprise, Capitol, and Columbia...

...At least three generations of Americans slow-danced and, with luck, made out with this guy's voice in the background...

...three-story billboards of Ol' Blue Eyes have been erected along Fifth Avenue in New York, the city of which Sinatra, at his zenith, was virtually an incarnation...

...The students were shocked (had they, I wondered, heard the damn song...

...Among later singers, Willie Nelson, Mandy Patinkin, and especially Harry Connick, Jr., have something of the same mojo: something...

...Maybe nobody was...

...Bing Crosby had a more natural delivery, as did the sadly neglected Perry Como-and Nat Cole had a delivery and a timbre almost preternatu-rally natural...

...Addressing little Margaret, who's sad at the falling of the leaves, the poet concludes, "It is the blight man was born for/It is Margaret you mourn for...

...And if this isn't sublime art, then nothing is...

...As Auden wrote of W. B. Yeats, "You were silly like us/Your gift survived it all...

...And forget the tantrums, the excesses, the Cosa Nostra connections, the goofy politics-all the stuff that Kitty Kelley detailed in her biography, His Way...

...They got all hot and dewy-eyed to the skinny, winsome kid in the bow tie who sang with Tommy Dorsey...

...The most musi-cianly of singers, a white male Sarah Vaughan, he has an ease, intelligence, and execution that, if you really listen, can blow you out of your chair...

...In his autobiography, It Wasn't all Velvet, Torme says that he learned more about singing from listening to and talking with Sinatra than from anybody else...

...And the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia told Musician magazine that his idea of an ideal studio soundmix was the Sinatra/Nelson Riddle collaborations of the fifties...

...As are we all...

...And yet...

...He's already received the Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan...