FRANK'S COLORS

To me, Frank Sinatra is synonymous with colour—whether it's the iconic hues of his 1950s Capitol album covers, such as the desaturated turquoise of In the Wee Small Hours, the tangerine orange of Songs for Swingin' Lovers!, or the Capri blue of Come Fly with Me. Just as each of his Capitol concept albums settled into a distinct emotional mood, they also found a colour to match their emotional and psychological tone.

It makes a crazy sort of sense, then, that in 1956 Sinatra chose to commission various composers and orchestrators—including the likes of André Previn, Elmer Bernstein, and Gordon Jenkins—to write orchestral pieces depicting a spectrum of colours for an album called Colors. With titles such as “Blue, the Dreamer,” “Red, the Violent,” and “Purple, the Schemer,” it would be easy to assume it was just another faux avant-garde experiment typical of 1950s exotica. But somehow, I can’t help thinking it stands as further testament to Sinatra’s innovation as an artist—always seeking to expand the concept album format he had essentially pioneered with his groundbreaking In the Wee Small Hours, a post-midnight, 16-track meditation on heartbreak.

A devoted lover of classical music and opera, Sinatra was anything but a philistine when it came to great, important music. He learned so much—texturally and emotionally—about how to mine the depths of the human heart and soul through his appreciation of composers like Tchaikovsky, Ravel, Debussy, Stravinsky, and, naturally (given his Italian heritage), Verdi and Puccini. This passion for great music helps explain how he was able to create so many colours of his own through his vocal palette.

Sinatra was a musical painter. Across his entire catalogue, you'll find all the emotional shades of the spectrum—from euphoria to suicidal despair, from the ebullient optimism of Young at Heart, to the serene calm of Moonlight in Vermont and Sunny Days, to the restless anxiety of Where Are You and the gloom of No One Cares. In this sense, I think of his greatest recordings as great paintings, each hung on the walls of analog and digital galleries.

Spookily, I can hear the opening phrase of Strouse and Adams’ 1962 song Once Upon a Time in Green, the Lover—which seems uncanny, as composer Gordon Jenkins, who orchestrated the album September of My Years (released nearly ten years later on Sinatra’s own label, Reprise), included it among its selections.