THE CRAFT BEHIND THE VOICE

By JAY COCKS

"I'VE NEVER HEARD OF A book like that," remarked the superb session guitarist Al Viola after Will Friedwald had come to interview him. "A book on Frank where they talked to guys like me...that were really there with him, sweating it out." Now that Sinatra! The Song Is You (Scribner; 557 pages; $30) is out, the sweat's on the record, and the century's greatest pop singer at last has a book that fits his personality and takes full measure of his stature.

Blithe, respectful, snappy and smart, Friedwald catches the creative fire of the singer, the implacable perfectionism that made his music seem both effortless and passionate and that ensured it would not only endure but also remain definitive. More than any other singer, Sinatra makes a song his own, part of a reciprocal musical autobiography between singer and audience. Forget all the gossip, the personal trials and tabloid headlines. This is the best book ever written about Sinatra's deepest secret: his craft.

A notoriously tough critic, especially of anything written about himself, even Sinatra should be pleased with The Song Is You, not least because Friedwald does on the page what Sinatra does in concert: talks about the writers of the song, the musicians who play it, conduct it and, perhaps most important in this book, arrange it. Stalwarts like Viola and pianist Bill Miller find a fair place when Friedwald shines the spotlight. He shows how great albums like Songs for Swingin' Lovers! and Only the Lonely were made, describing the process in meticulous detail, from nervous last-minute revisions to the singer's impatience with himself. After bungling a version of Billy Strayhorn's complex wonderment Lush Life, Sinatra allowed he would "leave that one for Nat Cole."

Those albums were a high point of Sinatra's collaboration with Nelson Riddle, whose arrangements helped create the classic Sinatra style--brash, melancholy, tremulous, defiant--and set a standard for a kind of grand intimacy that few could equal. "In his lifetime," Friedwald writes, "Riddle so completely represented the definitive sound of great American pop that he was taken for granted." No more. Sinatra! is invaluable for its excursions through the singer's musical soul, but it is unique in its biographical and critical portraits of Riddle, Billy May, Axel Stordahl, Gordon Jenkins and other arrangers on whom Sinatra depended for the architecture of his musical dreams.

Friedwald spoke with dozens of Sinatra sidemen, contemporaries (like Jo Stafford and Tony Bennett) and songwriters. But this book is in no sense an authorized religious journey. Friedwald is a cantankerous and opinionated writer, as readers of his previous and excellent Jazz Singing will know full well. The same wised-up, wise-guy style that makes it a breeze to read through Sinatra's career can turn and bite your throat. His assault on Sinatra's partners in the recent Duets sessions are so bloodthirsty that he occasionally loses his sense of humor and misses, say, the warmth and wit behind Bono's one-off with the Voice. Maybe that kind of short fuse comes from keeping close psychic company with Sinatra. But this same intimacy between critic and subject also gives the book its weight and its heat. Or, as the subject in question might put it himself, its swing. Sinatra! is a gasser.