The Whiteboard Jungle: Using the ‘Chairman of the Board’ as a teaching example
New Year’s Day. 1994. Las Vegas. Frank Sinatra.
A moment when my life changed for the better.
That was the only time I saw Sinatra perform live. And because of it, I have learned why Sinatra is considered by so many as the greatest popular singer of all time.
What amazed me about the show was that at age 78, a time when he could have just sat on a stool and read off the TelePrompTer, he moved gracefully about the stage singing the songs as if it were the first time he sang them.
I went from buying the first “Duets” album that came out in 1993 — which was the No. 2 album in the country on Billboard’s 200 right behind Pearl Jam’s “Vs.” — to now owning 70 CDs, 14 LPs, seven box sets, 24 books, and 18 DVDs and videotapes.
As a teacher, you want to share your passions with your students, so I have infused lessons on connotation and tone with Sinatra’s work.
When I teach Shakespeare, I use Sinatra’s rendering of the Gershwin classic “Someone to Watch Over Me” to show the importance of the proper reading of a line. Just as some actors struggle making sense of the Bard’s iambic pentameter, others can make even the most novice viewer understand what the character is saying, retaining the musicality of the words.
In “Someone to Watch Over Me,” the lyrics go “even though I may not be the man some girls think of as handsome.” Sinatra purposely links the words “man” and “some” to create the nonexistent word “mansome” so that it rhymes with “handsome” the way George and Ira intended when writing the song. When other singers pause after “man,” the rhyme is lost.
To demonstrate how the same words can have different meanings depending on how they are said, I play two versions of Rodgers and Hart’s “Where or When,” one recorded in 1958, the other performed live in Las Vegas in 1966.
In the earlier Capitol Records session arranged by Nelson Riddle, Sinatra narrates a wistful tale of love emitting a melancholy tone accompanied only by longtime pianist Bill Miller until an orchestra comes in during the final 40 seconds.
And when it does, Sinatra, who was practically whispering the words with the solo piano, expands to full voice louder than the instruments. The effect emphasizes how the speaker cannot remember when this chance encounter will happen again.
While only eight years apart, the two versions vary so much in approach that they almost sound like different songs. With the tempo tripled, the 1966 translation arranged by Billy Byers is swinging, upbeat, sung by a narrator without a care in the world.
Horns not strings are prominently heard along with a driving percussion with the signature Count Basie sound beneath Sinatra’s carefree tone.
Playing one of the lovers, Sinatra interprets the lyric that if they were to meet again, OK; if not, that’s OK, too. No hard feelings. Move on.
He halts before uttering each “before” in “it seems that we have met . . . before and laughed . . . before, and loved . . . before” emphasizing the deju vu element of the couple’s feelings. Sinatra’s interest is more in the playing with the words rather than exuding the emotions in them. He then holds the final “where or when” as long as he can, emphasizing more of an end than an open-ended question as in the 1958 take.
This interpretation was the one that Sinatra continued singing in live performances the rest of his life.
And while that life ended in 1998, next week marks the centennial of his birth, an apt moment to reflect on why Sinatra matters in the history of American popular music.
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BRIAN CROSBY is a teacher in the Glendale Unified School District and the author of “Smart Kids, Bad Schools” and “The $100,000 Teacher.” He can be reached at briancrosby.org.
