Frank Sinatra's Recorded Legacy - Sinatra's Voice

Sinatra's Voice

Sinatra made a point of studying Tommy Dorsey's trombone playing as a means of cultivating a more free-flowing vocal style — he noticed that Dorsey used a tiny airhole at the side of his mouth to sneak breaths when playing. Sinatra would employ a similar technique, and so be able to hold notes for incredibly long durations. In addition to this, Sinatra started to jog and swim underwater to develop his lung capacity — which enabled him to continue a musical phrase through a stanza without pausing, or breaking the note, for breath. Sinatra's legato-style of singing/phrasing took pop singing in new directions when most singers of the 1940s were keen to emulate Bing Crosby.

As happens with many singers, Sinatra suffered at least one period of major vocal difficulty, which he remedied with the help of Metropolitan Opera baritone Robert Merrill.

As a song-stylist, Sinatra's jazz-infused approach to singing seemed to occur with the end of the "Big Band" era and ushering in of an era that favored the vocalist and made him/her the focus, not the bandleader and his band.

Sinatra also possessed an outstanding vocal range. According to music critic Henry Pleasants “The voice itself was a typical Italian light baritone with a two octave range from G to G, declining, as it darkened in later years, to F to F and with greater potential at the top than he was commonly disposed to exploit. He could and sometimes did depress the larynx and ‘cover’ as classical singers do, to sustain a full rounded tone in moving up the scale. On his recording ‘Day by Day,’ for example he gives out with full-voiced, admirably focused E flats and F’s and even lands a briefly held but confident high A flat just before the end.” His early recordings found him singing in near-tenor range, hitting a high F on "All or Nothing At All" (1939) or "Where's My Bess", whilst being equally adept in the lower register, the low E on his 1962 recording of "Ol' Man River" being a prime example of such. His phrasing was also impeccable, getting to the heart of a song by emphasizing words and lines in ways that made a song more personal, whilst his ability to hold notes, sing above or behind the beat and rest on a note were hallmarks of a singer fully in command of his instrument.