Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [45]
And it was only when rock ’n’ roll killed his record sales and he started to tour heavily in the 1970s and 1980s that Sinatra became a true leader, in the more-or-less-benign-despot style of Dorsey. His musicians even gave him the same nickname: the Old Man. (Which, for most of the time he led a touring band, he actually was.) Frank even took up Dorsey’s model-railroading obsession: in late middle age, the unabashedly nostalgic Sinatra devoted an entire building in his Palm Springs compound to an enormous electric-train setup.
What thrilled him at the outset was simply the way Dorsey carried himself, the way he handled his fame and power: his ramrod posture, his smooth patter on the bandstand and at radio microphones, his perfect wardrobe (he was once photographed, during a summertime stand in New York, wearing tailored Bermuda shorts with his jacket and tie). Not to mention his eye for the ladies and his heavy after-hours drinking. Sinatra, always an obsessive, even copied some of the tiniest details—Dorsey’s Courtley cologne, his Dentist Prescribed toothpaste.
But of course the most important lessons the singer learned from the leader were musical. Sinatra was gigantically ambitious, virtually every move he made in his life had to do with the furtherance of his career, and in this respect he saw that Tommy Dorsey had a great deal to teach him. Much has been made of the magical breath control Sinatra supposedly learned at Dorsey’s feet—or rather at his back, while he was playing his magical trombone. “I used to watch Tommy’s back, his jacket, to see when he would breathe,” he said. “I’d swear the son of a bitch was not breathing. I couldn’t even see his jacket move … I thought, he’s gotta be breathing some place—through the ears?”
Dorsey did indeed have spectacular breath control, through a combination of anatomical good fortune—he was extremely broad chested—and artful deception. His trick was to take an extra breath, when he needed one, through a pinhole he would form at the corner of his mouth and which he would shield from prying eyes with his left hand, which, in standard trombonist’s form, was held close to the instrument’s mouthpiece. Hence those sixteen-bar (or thirty-two-bar, depending on who’s telling the story) legatos.
But his long trombone lines were more than trickery or showmanship: they were the melodic essence of his art. His band’s numbers usually began with a solo by the lead trombonist, to (1) instantly announce the presence of TD, and (2) quickly tell the story of the song. Both things were crucial on the radio, which, as the main medium for mass communication of the day, had a tremendous imaginative force that all began with sound. Through long years of study, Dorsey had arrived at a method of proclaiming the artist, and his art, that was as aurally unmistakable as the call of some glorious mythological bird.
And his whole band—which, after all, was his true instrument, a sixteen-piece extension of his towering personality—needed to be up to the task. The saxophonist Arthur “Skeets” Herfurt recalled: “Tommy sometimes used to make the whole orchestra (not just the trombones) play from the top of a page clear down to the bottom without taking a breath. It was way too many bars! But I sure developed lung power … Everybody in the band would learn to play like Tommy did.”
Clever as he was, Sinatra instantly realized he would have to raise his game vocally. Even if, as his first recordings with the band show, he began rather pallidly, trying to fit in and generally hold his own, he was watching and learning every second.1 Tommy Dorsey was a superstar (even if that vulgar word hadn’t yet been coined), and Sinatra was, by God, going to be one too. Even bigger. But copying Dorsey’s breath control was a far more powerful statement than copying the cologne or toothpaste he used. Sinatra had heard other singers, even very good ones,