POP MUSIC : A Life in His Voice : Two collections released to mark Frank Sinatra’s 75th birthday take him from brash exuberance to contemplative musing

To all those of us who somehow feel that we grew up with him, it is unthinkable but true that Frank Sinatra will turn 75 on Dec. 12.

I am thrust back to an autumn afternoon in 1943 when I stood on a Boston street, the whole block jammed curb to curb, mostly with teen-agers like myself, hoping to get into the movie house for a first glimpse of Sinatra in person. As he remembered on a television show 30 years later, he then was not much wider than the microphone stand, even in a wide-lapel suit and a floppy bow tie, and he was top heavy with what he described as 14 pounds of hair.

His durability, then and now at the summit of American popular singing, is unprecedented. The controversies surrounding his private life come and go, and the willingness of his admirers to dissociate the darkest of the controversies from his public performances is also unprecedented. It’s hard to think of anyone who has simultaneously enjoyed such a good press and such a bad press.

It is also hard, indeed impossible, to think of another entertainer whose life and work have so closely paralleled the lives of his earliest and what is still his principal audience.

The dreamy romantic crooner of his young career--his “I’ll Never Smile Again” period, so to speak--was beautifully attuned to the romantic teen-agers and young adults who discovered him when he was still singing with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, before he ventured on to his first solo albums.

The older, wiser, love-bruised, sardonic but still indefatigably romantic Sinatra of his and our middle years was once again attuned to an audience that had begun to see that “September Song” was not for somebody else, but that on the other hand, it was possible “The Best Is Yet to Come.”

And, at 75, still performing around the calendar and the world with an authority and a verve that has no equal in popular male singing, Sinatra is acquiring new, young audiences who can suddenly understand what their elders have been saying all these years.

Now Francis Albert Sinatra stands as a born survivor, and all the early fans who once hoped to catch him on those remote radio broadcasts from the Meadowbrook nightclub in New Jersey listen to him these days with, not least, a certain amount of pride in their own survival.

In celebration of the 75th birthday, a real treasure trove of Sinatra’s work is being marketed. From Capitol Records comes a three-CD package called “Frank Sinatra--The Capitol Years.” There are 75 songs, including at least one, “Here Goes,” discovered in the archives and never released before.

The package’s notes include a large excerpt from Nancy Sinatra’s book about her father, plus a history of his Capitol career by Pete Kline and notes on the 75 recordings by Kline and Ric Ross.

Not to be outdone, the label Sinatra started and later sold to Warners, Reprise, is issuing under the Warner-Reprise label a four-CD package: 81 tunes, several never previously issued, including “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart,” a track thought to have been lost but identified by a couple of zealous collectors in Albany, N.Y.

The printed material with the Reprise package includes a rhapsodic appreciation by William Kennedy, the author of “Ironweed,” and a reportorial but no less rhapsodic history of the singer at key moments in his career by David McClintick (“Indecent Exposure”). The song-by-song notes are by Jonathan Schwartz.

Warner-Reprise Video is also releasing a package of three Sinatra television specials, “A Man and His Music” from 1965, “A Man and His Music: Ella and Jobim” (1967) and “Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back” from 1973, following his two-year hiatus when he played golf, did not improve his handicap (17) and grew bored.

All three specials have their particular charms, but Sinatra’s hoofing reunion with Gene Kelly on “Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back,” remembering their strenuous dance numbers in “Higher and Higher” 30 years earlier, is a classic piece of entertaining. Called “I Can’t Do That Any More,” the skit proved that they still could, and demonstrated that Sinatra, from a standing start, had become an expert dancer himself.

His duet with Ella Fitzgerald on “The Lady Is a Tramp” from the 1967 show is another wonderfully charged encounter. On the same program, Sinatra sings “Old Man River” with only a piano accompaniment and confirms what an effective actor-singer he is.

The anguishing question for the Sinatra faithful is which of the two CD packages, the Capitol or the Reprise (both also available on cassette), is the better and thus the better to have. The equally anguishing answer is that the truly faithful will want and will almost have to have both.

The Capitol songs are probably likeliest to be in most collections already. They notably include the brash, jazzy, exuberant numbers (“All of Me,” “Got the World On a String”) that gave Sinatra’s career a fresh lift and that still figure prominently in his concert appearances.

At Reprise, in full charge of his own musical destiny, answering to no one’s musical tastes but his own, Sinatra opted for large, richer sounds and, often, unfamiliar and uncommon ballads with long melodic lines and contemplative musings. Often on Reprise he is the world-wise veteran with as much to look back upon as to look forward to, although he does a lot of both. The Reprise work includes some of the best and most testing performances of what can now be thought of as his middle period. (It also includes such rousers as “My Way.”)

There are more previously un available numbers in the Reprise package, another reason why--if forced to choose between the two releases--Sinatra devotees may elect the Reprise set for the rarities and the relatively less familiar songs.

In the early 1950s, Sinatra had become increasingly dissatisfied with the novelty numbers he was being asked to record at Columbia Records and when his contract ran out in 1953, Sinatra moved to the young Capitol label. By a happy coincidence it was the same year that “From Here to Eternity,” for which he received an Oscar nomination as the doomed Maggio, was released. A very good year, which revitalized Sinatra’s career as both actor and singer.

The songs he recorded for Capitol over the next nine years are probably the best-known of his repertoire, starting with “Taking a Chance on Love” and “Gonna Sit Right Down and Right Myself a Letter” on his first album, “Swing Easy.”

What arranger Nelson Riddle called “the heartbeat rhythm,” which was also timed to Sinatra’s uptempo finger snapping, give the tunes on this and two later albums in particular, “Songs for Young Lovers” and “Songs for Swinging Lovers” a drive and a joie de vivre that made clear Sinatra was strongly influenced by jazz and could fairly be called a jazz singer as well as an unsurpassed balladeer.

The balladeer, romantic as ever, showed up himself in his third Capitol album, “In the Wee Small Hours,” with lush arrangements by Riddle of “Last Night When We Were Young” and other songs now standard in Sinatra’s programs. Gordon Jenkins, with his gorgeous arrangements for massed violins, joined Sinatra first in 1958 for an album called “Where Are You?” with “Laura” among the choice offerings.

By the time Sinatra did his final recording sessions at Capitol in 1961 he had already formed his own label, Reprise, and begun recording for it. Riddle and Jenkins moved over with him and continued to be his principal arrangers as long as they lived, but he also hired such jazz-worthy arrangers as Johnny Mandel, Neil Hefti, Quincy Jones, Marty Paich and Sy Oliver, along with Don Costa, who has done such favorites in the Sinatra book as “Come Rain or Come Shine” and “Night and Day.”

The problem for Sinatra, as for most singers, is to keep finding fresh material to avoid the monotony of singing a diet of old favorites exclusively. (The late Billy Daniels once estimated he had sung “That Old Black Magic” 25,000 times and Sinatra would probably as soon not estimate how many times he has sung, “Got the World on a String” or “My Way” or “My Kind of Town,” even though they thrill audiences each time.)

The Reprise years reflect not only the great standards done or re-done (a version of “The Lady Is a Tramp” arranged by Billy Byers for a Madison Square Garden gig). They also reflect a quest for new ballads, ideally suited for Jenkins’ lovely violin scorings. A previously unreleased version of “Just as Though You Were Here” is 1974 vintage Sinatra at his most expressive.

If his marriages with Cole Porter and Rodgers & Hart seem made in heaven, he is also at home with George Harrison (“Something”) and Stephen Sondheim (a very fine version of “Send In the Clowns”).

Doubly moving because it was Johnny Mercer’s final lyric is a saloon song, “Empty Tables,” melody by Jimmy Van Heusen, sung by Sinatra accompanied only by Bill Miller at the piano. Sinatra does another 3-in-the-morning-feeling song, Jule Styne’s “It’s Sunday,” with Tony Mottola’s guitar as his only accompaniment. It’s a tough test for a singer, with no fiddles or brass to hide behind; then again, Sinatra has not only never needed protection, he has held his against the Count Basie and Duke Ellington bands.

Listening consecutively to the 200-odd renditions the CDs and the cassettes represent is not recommended for the faint of heart or ear. It is a lot, even of Sinatra. But the briefest sampling proves that what has been constant in his singing, even as the voice has matured and grown darker, heavier and stronger, is his quite extraordinary technique.

His breath control (which is to say, his never seeming to need to breathe), his immaculate phrasing, his ability to go free of the melody and the beat like an improvising jazz man, yet his reverent respect for the ballad lyrics, his smooth and sometimes astonishing glissandos to the bottom of his register (as on “Old Man River”), his emotional range from raucous joy to wee-hours melancholy--are not equalled by any popular singer of his time, which by now is a long time indeed.

Like Louis Armstrong, Sinatra is not easy to sing along with because his phrasing is so full of small and pleasing surprises, just ahead of or behind the beat. Then again, we ought only to be listening anyway. We can always sing in the shower with the runners-up in popular song.

In his notes, the novelist William Kennedy writes about attending a Sinatra concert: “A lifetime of staying young at center stage: how can anybody be so good for so long? . . . (He) fades down the stairs and out, and you follow him with your eyes because he is carrying the sound of your youth, the songs of your middle age. And then you think, the song is you, pal, the song is you.”