Author Donald Clarke |
Donald Clarke, who has also published a biography of Billie Holiday and the study The Rise and Fall of Popular Music, has edited the Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music, and runs the very recommendable website Donald Clarke's Music Box (where you can find the Encyclopedia in its entirety for free), was born in 1940 and grew up in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a place "where there is no there," as he himself puts it. After working in a car factory for ten years and then attending college, he decided to travel to Great Britain to teach in a primary school. At first it was going to be just ten weeks, but he wound up staying in Britain for twenty-five years! He returned to the United States in 1998 and now lives in Allentown, Pennsylvania, with his wife of 34 years, "a very successful magazine editor-in-chief" who works for Organic Garden magazine. He has three children, four grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren and considers himself now "the luckiest man in the world." Music has always been his great passion, which is something that we both share, and so without further ado, let us turn now to the beginning of our first conversation, made out of excerpts of our recent electronic correspondence.
Anton Garcia-Fernandez (for The Vintage Bandstand): When I first saw your book on Sinatra, All or Nothing at All, on the
shelves of the bookstore Shakespeare & Co., in Paris, France, I was struck by its
subtitle, "A Life of Frank Sinatra." This seemed to imply that this
was a fresh, personal take on Sinatra's life, about which so much had been
written over the years. It was, so to speak, your life of Frank
Sinatra. Was that your intention as you sat down to write the book? In other
words, with so much in print about Sinatra, what new perspective on his life
were you hoping to bring to the fore with your book?
Mr. Clarke: Yes, the title was chosen carefully. Somebody once wrote that
"There is no such thing as an autobiography, not even an
autobiography," meaning, I take it, that in order to tell you my life
story, I would also have to tell you the life stories of all of my ancestors,
everybody I have ever known, etc. Similarly, there will be as many
biographies of Sinatra as people willing to write them. The last one I looked
at had the author pretending to be a fly inside the limousine quoting Frank and
Barbara having a squabble, as though he had been there with a notebook. I
didn't have a new perspective, but I've read enough lousy biographies so that
what I wanted to write was the book that I would want to read if I were looking
for a book about Sinatra, covering both the life and the music. I think I have
a knack for telling the reader what he or she wants to know without patronizing
anybody. So, yes, it is my life of Sinatra, and I wasn't afraid to
put myself in it.
Another aspect is that if Sinatra hadn't been a singer, as I wrote in
the book, he might have been a New Jersey plumbing contractor, and we never
would have heard of him unless he got arrested. In other words, at some level
he must have been an ordinary guy. This was after I had written the Billie
Holiday book and I realized that what I was really writing about was the
problem of being an American in the twentieth century.
Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby |
Mr. Clarke: I enjoyed Crosby's work, but I was never that big a fan. I heard him in
the late 1940s and onward, and was surprised many years later to hear some of
his earlier records, when he wasn't so relaxed, or maybe the white pop music
style was different in the 1930s. I believe that whites were learning from
blacks in the jazz era, but that they didn't really master the idiom until
after WWII. There are more of Crosby's recordings I would like to hear --
there's a big compilation of radio broadcasts on Mosaic that he made in the
1950s with a small jazz group. But for me his innovation was not so much
interpreting songs as the fact that he was influenced by jazz, and also knew
how to use a microphone, so that he became the first modern recording vocalist, with Louis Armstrong. So Crosby was good for Sinatra to learn from, but there was an immediate
difference: Crosby wanted to be your boyfriend; Sinatra wanted to be your
lover.
Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald |
Mr. Clarke: A combination of things. First of all, the sound of his voice was attractive. Then there was the honesty he bragged about. When he was singing, there was no artifice. Also, he sang ballads or uptempo, and it doesn't matter if he was a jazz singer. I think I said in the book that he was not, but I would say now that we can call him a jazz singer, "if the essence of jazz singing is to make the familiar sound fresh, and to make a lyric come alive with personal meaning," which is something I wrote about Billie Holiday. The other day I happened to hear Ella Fitzgerald singing "This Year's Kisses," and it wasn't a patch on Holiday's version. Then I recalled that Ella had said that singing a song was like telling a beautiful story that happened to somebody else. Much as I admire Ella, when you heard Holiday or Sinatra singing a song, you knew they were telling you something about themselves. And that's what a great jazz musician does.
TVB: And to finish with Crosby's influence on Sinatra, there is a passage of your book where you say that at some point Crosby allegedly advised Sinatra not to rely too heavily on just one arranger, a piece of advice that, from your point of view, was a mistake. However, couldn't we say that if Sinatra were to rely on one arranger alone, that would inevitably lend an air of sameness to his recordings? For example, I feel that George Siravo's arrangements for Sinatra toward the end of his tenure with Columbia are a breath of fresh air after several years of Axel Stordahl's string arrangements, as beautifully lyrical as Stordahl's work is. What do you think about that?
Mr. Clarke: If I disagreed with Crosby, I was wrong. I was probably wishing that Sinatra had made all his records after 1953 with Nelson Riddle. The Siravo records were a welcome change from Stordahl, but I find them studio-bound. This question has partly to do with the playing of white bands as opposed to the black masters of jazz. The white studio arrangers and musicians had improved immeasurably by the mid-1950s, in my opinion. Also, bands which were on the road, like Tommy Dorsey's around 1940, learned how to breathe and think together, as opposed to ad hoc studio groups, which also improved post WWII.
TVB: And to finish with Crosby's influence on Sinatra, there is a passage of your book where you say that at some point Crosby allegedly advised Sinatra not to rely too heavily on just one arranger, a piece of advice that, from your point of view, was a mistake. However, couldn't we say that if Sinatra were to rely on one arranger alone, that would inevitably lend an air of sameness to his recordings? For example, I feel that George Siravo's arrangements for Sinatra toward the end of his tenure with Columbia are a breath of fresh air after several years of Axel Stordahl's string arrangements, as beautifully lyrical as Stordahl's work is. What do you think about that?
Mr. Clarke: If I disagreed with Crosby, I was wrong. I was probably wishing that Sinatra had made all his records after 1953 with Nelson Riddle. The Siravo records were a welcome change from Stordahl, but I find them studio-bound. This question has partly to do with the playing of white bands as opposed to the black masters of jazz. The white studio arrangers and musicians had improved immeasurably by the mid-1950s, in my opinion. Also, bands which were on the road, like Tommy Dorsey's around 1940, learned how to breathe and think together, as opposed to ad hoc studio groups, which also improved post WWII.
And that is it for the first installment. I would like to thank Mr. Clarke for his kindness in addressing all these questions, as well as for his giving freely of his time. More installments in this series of Conversations with Donald Clarke will be forthcoming!
'Swing and Dance with Frank Sinatra,' a Columbia LP arranged by George Siravo |
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