Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [118]
The first couple of things, it turned out, were songs, one by Wilder and one by a quirky writer of rustic Americana named Willard Robison. Both, tellingly, had the word “old” in the title: “Old School Teacher,” by Robison, and Wilder’s “Just an Old Stone House.” The two numbers, similar tonally and thematically, couldn’t have been more different from the love ballads Frank Sinatra was recording in the mid-1940s. They were art songs, with melodies that wandered and twined and landed in unexpected places. It was brave and imaginative of Sinatra to want to record them, and it was nervy, even for him, to push Manie for studio time and musicians, musicians to be conducted not by Stordahl but by Mitch Miller. But Frank pushed, and Manie yielded. Sinatra and Miller recorded the songs.
When it came to Sinatra’s next high-art initiative, though, Sacks drew the line. Frank, whose ears were opening up to all kinds of classical music, listened raptly to an air-check disc Miller had given him, containing two of Wilder’s serious orchestral compositions. Sinatra played the record three or four times, then picked up the phone and tracked down the Professor. “These should be recorded,” he said. He called Manie first thing in the morning and told him the same thing.
Manie begged to differ. He pleaded wartime shortages: “We don’t have enough shellac to even press the stuff from our own artists.”
“Sinatra gave us the bad news,” Miller recalled. “So I came up with an idea. I said, ‘Why don’t you conduct them? Then he can’t refuse you—if your name is on it.’ And Frank agreed, although he had never conducted.”
Never conducted? He couldn’t read a note of music! It was a crazy idea, but to his eternal credit Frank went at the project—which, as Miller had predicted, Manie was forced into okaying—with grace, dignity, and even a kind of humility.
“Listen,” he told the studio full of tough New York musicians gathered to play Wilder’s airs for oboe, bassoon, flute, and English horn, as well as two other pieces. “I don’t know the first thing about conducting, but I know this music and I love it, and if you’ll work with me, I think we can get it down.”
“That was a very strange session,” recalled George Avakian. “I thought to myself, ‘My God, Sinatra isn’t a musician; this will be a disaster.’ But it wasn’t. He really did conduct. Alec, of course, rehearsed the orchestra thoroughly, and they were also all crack musicians. In fact, I think Mitch Miller played oboe on that.”
He did indeed, but Miller—never one to hide his light under a bushel—also claims to have been in charge of the whole show. “Sinatra was then at the Waldorf [Wedgwood Room],” Miller said, “and he would finish at one in the morning. All the top musicians were there with us at the old Liederkranz Hall on Fifty-eighth Street. And I rehearsed all the stuff and got it ready, and Frank came in and he waved the stick. And he didn’t get in the way.”
One of the musicians who played on the session, the flutist Julius Baker, was more charitable. “You know,” he said long afterward, “Sinatra wasn’t so bad as a conductor.”
Frank Sinatra Conducts the Music of Alec Wilder, the cover of Columbia Masterworks Set M-637 declared, when it was released the following spring. Sinatra’s name was in considerably larger type than Wilder’s, a fact Frank protested, but Columbia, Manie explained, had to sell something. The album cover was a black-and-white photo of a skeletally thin Sinatra, on a field of yellow, tieless, his white shirt buttoned to the neck, a belt tightly cinching the twenty-eight-inch waist of his pleated pants. He was raising his arms, his mouth open, his eyes closed as if in transport. His head was highlighted in a white circle, like the halos on medieval icons.
Columbia Masterworks Set M-637 was an album in the old sense: a cover with contents. Heavy contents. Inside the album were three twelve-inch shellac 78-rpm records, green labeled, each with one Wilder composition per side, six in all: Air for Oboe, Air for Bassoon,