Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [60]
Axel Stordahl was a first-generation Norwegian-American from Staten Island who had joined the Dorsey band as fourth trumpeter in the mid-1930s. He was a less than stellar horn player,1 but it quickly became clear that he had a gift for arranging ballads. When Sinatra joined the band, it was as if he and Axel had each found his missing piece. Physically and temperamentally, the two couldn’t have been more different: Stordahl, who was tall, bald, and pale lashed, looked like nothing so much as a Norwegian fisherman. He even wore a fisherman’s cap and smoked a pipe. He was intensely calm, quietly humorous. Sinatra, who liked to nickname people he was fond of, called him Sibelius.
Frank Sinatra, of course, was the opposite of calm. Yet when he sang slow numbers, some sort of ethereal best self took over, and Stordahl’s writing helped him attain it. The pattern had been set on the singer’s first two recordings with Dorsey, “The Sky Fell Down” and “Too Romantic,” and it had continued on every ballad he’d done (and Buddy Rich had grimaced through) with the band.
The recording session, which took place at RCA’s Los Angeles studios on Monday afternoon, January 19, 1942, went off perfectly. Stordahl conducted. There were fourteen players on the date: four saxes and a guitarist who were part of the Dorsey band, and an oboist, four violinists, a violist, a bass fiddler, a harpist, and a pianist—Skitch Henderson—who were not. Pointedly, there was no drummer. Nor did Dorsey attend the session—even though both of the two singles that resulted (released on RCA’s discount Bluebird label) were labeled “Frank Sinatra with Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra.”
Sinatra had been a wreck in the weeks leading up to the session. Whenever he wasn’t rehearsing, he was fretting about the huge implications of leaving Dorsey. No band singer had ever gone out on his own before (though Dick Haymes, who’d replaced Sinatra with Harry James, was trying some solo club dates in between his gigs as Benny Goodman’s boy singer). Frank was “almost tubercular,” Nick Sevano said. “He was seeing all kinds of doctors, but he was so nervous that he couldn’t eat. He never finished a meal … He started talking a lot about death and dying … ‘I get the feeling that I’m going to die soon,’ he’d say.”
Yet when he walked into the studio that Monday afternoon, it was with a swagger. Harry Meyerson, the Victor A&R man who ran the session, remembered: “Frank was not like a band vocalist at all. He came in self-assured, slugging. He knew exactly what he wanted. He knew he was good.”
In fact, it was the bravado that was phony—half-phony, anyway. The fact of the matter was that Frank Sinatra was scared shitless. But (true to a pattern he would maintain for the rest of his life) when he was afraid, he liked to make others jump.
A few days later, when the first pressings of the recordings came in, his fear diminished considerably: they were terrific. Axel Stordahl later recalled sitting for an entire sunny afternoon in Sinatra’s room at the Hollywood Plaza, listening to the four songs over and over on the singer’s portable record player. “He was so excited you almost believed he had never recorded before,” Stordahl said. “I think this was a turning point in his career.”
Between the lines, Sibelius sounded a little distanced from the exultation, perhaps a bit regretful at not being able to get out and enjoy that glorious Los Angeles afternoon. That was the way it was, though, when you were close to the drama that was Sinatra: you stayed put in your orchestra seat until