THE STANDARD BEARER

Frank Sinatra will be 80 next month. He's the 20th century's greatest popular singer, with a career that stretches back over more than 50 years. But what is it about this '18-carat manic depressive' that has kept him at the top, from teen idol to grand old man?

SIX YEARS ago I saw Frank Sinatra, aged 74, in concert at the Toronto Skydome. It may be stretching the truth to say that I saw him; the Skydome is a baseball stadium, supposedly the biggest in the world, and though its press box affords a fine panoramic view when the Toronto Blue Jays are playing at home, it reduces stage performers to distant, cavorting dots. There was a huge video screen, if you wished to survey the star in close-up, but you can get TV specials at home, where they come with interesting camera-angles. So one listened to the music, which was loud and clear, and concentrated hard on the fact that it was emanating from the intense, tuxedoed, pacing figure hundreds of feet below.

As critic and lyricist Gene Lees once pointed out, Sinatra can hire people to do everything for him - except sing. The thing that has set him apart and made a corporation of him also makes him a working animal like the rest of us. Strictly speaking, then, only the vocal part of the entertainment was coming out of him. But he makes it seem like more. In the 55 years of his performing career - a phenomenal span for a pop singer, with most of it spent at the top - he has consistently sung the best arrangements of (somewhat less consistently) the best songs around. And it's a peculiar part of his authority that as he sings, he seems - as if summoning the band around him to recreate the song - to be calling those orchestrations into being. In a literal sense he has already done so; he commissioned them and they were fashioned to his specifications. It's both actual and poetic justice that he, alone among singers, should insist on crediting arrangers as well as composers when he introduces a song in concert.

His repertoire that night included at least two stand-out orchestral charts from the 1960s: Harold Arlen's "Come Rain or Come Shine" in a majestically arching orchestration by Don Costa, and Cy Coleman's "The Best is Yet to Come", a lean driving song arranged to match by Quincy Jones in a version that Sinatra first sang with the Count Basie band. I trembled slightly when he announced them; they seemed severe tests of energy for an ageing man. But he crested triumphantly over the pealing strings and dark-blue horns of the first, and went punch for punch with the rhythm section in the second. He then embarked on the Soliloquy ("my boy Bill") from Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel, which really sounded foolhardy; we had heard that his memory and concentration were failing, and this is a long dramatic piece which absolutely depends on the precise depiction of rapidly changing moods while moving to a big, high climax that has to be met head-on. It was faultless: better than he had sung it on record, a quarter of a century earlier. My other main memory of the evening is that the playing area was plagued with flies and that one half expected Sinatra to quit the platform cursing. But whatever explosions may have occurred backstage he kept his good humour on it. He seemed dedicated to giving the house, which was by no means full, the best possible show. For all the bad raps that have been hung on him over the years, there are at least two groups of people to whom his devotion seems unquestioned: his musicians and his audience.

He also sang "My Way", the bombastic dirge that he adopted as his own self-glorifying credo, and which the world, or part of it, seems to have bought as the centre-panel of his image. The second-best criticism of "My Way" that I have encountered was delivered by a lyricist friend who - shuddering at its abuses of rhyme, scansion and conversational English - named it as his least favourite song "without exemption". The best came from Sinatra himself who, when it was first played for him, dismissed it as being "too much on the nose". That hits it exactly on the nose. It is impossible to think of "My Way" as just another song sung by Sinatra. It comes to us as his autobiographical statement. He tells us, with embarrassing directness, how uncompromising he is; and compromises in doing so.

The compromise is not just the singing of a bad song; if that's a sin, all vocalists are damned. It lies in the desecration of his greatest gift: the gift of impersonality. Like any great actor - which is what, in song, he assuredly is - he speaks not about himself but from himself. He was put among us to tell us about us, drawing on his own experience but never flaunting it. He knows this himself; his on-stage patter proves it. He heralds "One for My Baby" with a portrait - almost a short story - of the heartbroken drunk who sings it. He tells us that "Send In the Clowns" is about a break-up - and, though it's sung in the first person, "whether it's the man or the woman who left is unimportant".

The Sinatra career is stuffed with paradox. He calls himself "a saloon singer" and appears mainly in concert halls and sports arenas - which he does bizarrely infuse with something resembling intimacy. He seems alternately to believe in his own hype and to decry it. ("I've been overly rewarded in my lifetime, and that's a fact.") And in writing of his "impersonality", when everybody knows that he sings in the most individual voice of any popular singer, I am brushing up against the giant paradox of them all. Either that or I'm crazy.

SINATRA SINGS what are loosely known as "standards": a genre whose boundaries are difficult to define but whose centre consists of the best songs written for Broadway, Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley in the first half of this century. Personal taste apart, the chief male singers in this area pretty much choose themselves. Before Sinatra there were Bing Crosby and, I would say, Fred Astaire. Contemporary with or just after him are Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett, and Mel Torme. All but Torme have idiosyncratic, imperfect voices - which explains why he has had less popular success than the others; his voice is too beautiful to be human. His phrasing is impeccably colloquial but he never seems to be talking to you as intimately as do his peers. Crosby, Astaire, Cole and Bennett come over in their music as fairly uncomplicated good guys, whether rough-hewn or urbane. So, some of the time, does Sinatra; he can be extraordinarily likeable. But he is also more complex. He seems to suffer more. He gets angrier. He is more intelligent, certainly more sensitive, and he notices small things in lyrics. (So does Astaire, but he doesn't have the same vocal resources to put them over.) He can also be exuberantly, intoxicatingly happy; and he can convey this without singing very loud or very fast. (He is the master of medium swing.) He has, in short, a temperament - the most interesting in popular music - and his songs are refracted through it. He once described himself, in a quote that's been endlessly recycled, as "an 18-carat manic depressive"; and professionally it seems to have been an extremely useful affliction to have. Of course, his audience approaches his work with full awareness of his private life - the brawls, the affairs, the tempestuous marriages - and there is an assumption that the life has infected the work. But it's just as likely to be the other way about. It doesn't really matter much which it is. Another line from the same interview, even more frequently quoted because even more pertinent, says it best: "Whatever has been said about me personally is unimportant. When I sing, I believe I'm honest." And this belief is communicated and shared.

In the end, he's a transparent singer. The temperament colours the songs, it may even transform them, but the songs take precedence. This has something to do with the way he pronounces the words. He actually contravenes one of the basic rules of popular singing: that the singing voice should be an extension of the speaking voice. More exactly, his singing is an extension of an idealised speaking voice. The TV mini-series Sinatra, produced by his daughter Tina, includes a scene in which a teacher approaches the fledgling vocalist with the advice that if he wants to do justice to the songs he sings, he had better get rid of his raw New Jersey accent. Presumably this, or something like it, actually happened. From the Forties to the Nineties Sinatra has had two voices - one raucous, one refined, to put it crudely - and hearing them alternate in live performance can be a bracing experience. By refined, I do not mean affected; he sings the purest American English, with no hint of classical voice production. He is fanatical - pedantic, actually - about final consonants. His very first hit song, "All or Nothing at All", recorded with Harry James's band in 1939, contains the line "if your heart never could yield to me". He carefully separates "yield" from "to", and has continued to do so in his several re-recordings of it. Probably, as that era of songwriting recedes from us, he has taken an added satisfaction in accenting a word as formal as "yield". There is no question here of breaking the thought; the phrasing remains legato, and the care he takes actually adds to the ardour of the song. He has dealt as fastidiously with the recurring title-phrase of "Night and Day", with "don't you love farce" in "Send In the Clowns", and with innumerable others.

The effect of this passionate clarity is to make the familiar strange. Many of the songs Sinatra sings were classics before he got to them; most have been done by dozens of other people. But the sculptured deliberation with which he endows them (and this applies to up-tempo tunes as well as to slow ballads) leaves them hanging in space, three-dimensional. He is not telling us to listen to a song as if we had never heard it before; he is acknowledging that we know it by heart, and then persuading us that we had never really heard it at all. He explores its crevices, and takes us on the expedition; we get a highly interpreted performance from which the interpreter finally disappears. He can even give this classic weight to a new song ("All the Way", for example) written specially for him. Indeed, when his enunciation slackens it's a sign, maybe unconscious, that he doesn't think the song is worth his while; a comforting thought when you listen to the soft-rock things that have infiltrated his repertoire since the late Sixties.

Sometimes he can add a further layer of stylisation. His 1956 treatment of "I've Got You Under My Skin" (as arranged by Nelson Riddle on Songs for Swingin' Lovers) is an acknowledged masterpiece, infallibly exciting; subsequent performances recreate the old routine, but they also implicitly comment on it, and on our awareness of it. In "Blues in the Night" (from his most famous ballad collection, Only the Lonely) he makes no pretence of being a blues singer; he plays the idea of a man self- consciously toying with blues imagery and blues cadences as a means of exploring his own unhappiness, and from all these layers of artifice, truth emerges. It may not be a perfect account of the song but it works for him. His power is not limited to love songs. When he sings "Ol' Man River", he cuts to the bleak heart of Oscar Hammerstein's lyric ("I'm tired of livin' an' scared of dyin' ") more powerfully than any of the rolling bass-baritones who traditionally perform it. Unlike them, he actually sounds oppressed. (And Jerome Kern, the song's composer, approved. He said he always wanted it sung by a small guy.)

Even his famous, or notorious, lyrical tamperings are thoughtfully, purposefully done. You may or may not like the hip updatings, the dropped syllables and expanded contractions ("I have got you under my skin") but they never, as is the case with some of his imitators, stem from carelessness or ignorance. They are consistent with the song, at least as he sees it, and they never destroy the musical or lyrical structure.

There is one lamentable exception, and it's on the most played of his later recordings. Whenever "New York, New York" starts up on the radio I pray that his interpolated demand to be "A-number-one" will have been magically expunged from the record. But it remains, rhyming with nothing, defacing an otherwise irresistible performance. Though whether the mature Sinatra sounds anything like the starry-eyed kid depicted in the song I seriously doubt.

"New York, New York" counts as one of his hits. There have been surprisingly few of these, even during the Forties when he was an accredited teenage idol arousing unprecedented female hysteria. From the Fifties onwards he sold albums rather than singles. But this has worked to his advantage. Tony Bennett is obliged to keep leaving his heart in San Francisco, and Judy Garland's fans would have lynched her if she had failed one single time to take them over the rainbow; but Sinatra has no songs he absolutely has to sing. This has kept him from getting into nostalgia (many of his fans are into it, of course, but that's a different story) and allowed him to function as a National Theatre of American song. Will Friedwald, a young American critic whose comprehensive new book Sinatra! The Song is You is the best volume yet written on the music, even claims that Sinatra virtually invented the American standard. This is debatable - plenty of great songs have established themselves without his going near them - but it's certain that his Fifties albums, along with Ella Fitzgerald's Songbook series, have mapped out the repertoire for listeners and subsequent series, and that his taste was extraordinary. He was already showing it in the Forties when 78s were all there were and when his voice was still sweet and gentle. One of his rediscoveries at that time, Rodgers and Hart's superb "It Never Entered My Mind", is a wonderful picture of a dedicated young romantic encountering grown-up erotic disillusion as if for the first time, and fascinated by it.

When he signed with Capitol Records in the Fifties, coming back after a period of professional and personal disaster, everything developed fast. His dormant jazz instincts blossomed in the LPs Songs for Swingin' Lovers and A Swingin' Affair - one great song after another in the most insouciantly confident versions ever made. "You Make Me Feel So Young", the first cut on the first disc, says it all; returning to it, the surprise and joy is how unforced it sounds. It's youthful and mature at the same time, the perfect cusp. The bloom was still on the voice but a new metallic edge was creeping in, and the balance of the two plus his new-minted rhythm made even his ephemeral singles of the time (the buoyant "Take a Chance" is my favourite) into perfect delights. Nelson Riddle, the most celebrated of Sinatra's musical collaborators, told me how they would approach a new album project; Sinatra would have specific ideas about mood, tempo and instrumentation though Riddle noted that as the conference progressed the singer would start to flag and he would be told to do the last few tunes "any way you want".

Simultaneously he was starting a series of torch-song albums that were more than generalised collections of sad ballads. Each had a separate mood, a subtly different proportioning of hope, despair and remembrance. The line began in 1955 with In the Wee Small Hours, which is primarily wistful, and stretches all the way to 1982 and She Shot Me Down, a set of very specific songs about particular wrecked relationships. Sinatra does some of his most searching and compassionate singing on this set, and it's significant that one can use the word "compassion" for what could easily become self-pity. He starts from within and reaches out.

BY NOW, the voice was deeper, darker and narrower, and it's become more hoarse and haggard since. On the face of it this should have turned him into more of a rhythm singer, hiding from long notes. In fact it's gone the other way. His "up" tunes now can sound choppy or frenzied; the ballads get more nakedly harrowing, without degenerating into melodrama.

Even in the Sixties a rasp was setting in. He had started that decade as the boss of his own new record company, Reprise, and for a few years it was the musical reflection of Kennedy's America, confident and worldly. My favourite album from that era is Sinatra and Swingin' Brass, a neglected but especially witty combination of material, singing and arrangements (by Neal Hefti). Up until 1963, I can bear witness, it was still cool for teenagers to like Sinatra, or jazz and standards generally. Rock was still a subsidiary stream; it wasn't until the coming of the Beatles that one had to get defensive. He sold the label, though he continued to record for it; it may be clutching at straws to point out that it was only after that that his sleeve notes, previously rather literate, became unbearably sycophantic. He started singing unsuitable songs, of which only a few were hits, but his best work was extraordinary. Another underrated session, with Duke Ellington, produced a wonderfully world-weary "Indian Summer". An album with bossa-nova king Antonio Carlos Jobim demonstrated Sinatra's ability to encounter a song - or in this case a whole genre - and make it his own, while also making it more fully itself. His all-passion-spent rendition of a Jobim song called "Dindi" may be the finest thing he has ever done. The Sinatra of this era, and of some others, reminds me of something Kenneth Tynan once said about Laurence Olivier: that his finest effects seemed to have been dredged up from a huge pit of exhaustion. There are obvious parallels between Sinatra and Olivier: each the acknowledged world-master of his game, each a compulsive performer, each an obsessive technician. The difference is that with Sinatra the technique disappears, the mannerisms are subsumed in the material. I often found it hard to believe Olivier. I have nearly always believed Sinatra.

I am aware that I have left out the worst things that have been said about him as a man. I have also left out some of the best. It was once said that nobody who played trumpet could ever believe that Louis Armstrong was an Uncle Tom. I doubt if anyone who has tried to sing a classic American song could think ill of Frank Sinatra. !