“Frank Sinatra” The legend

Our life is always full of ups and downs, moments of madness, calm, and power that makes it worthy of adventure, and challenge against all circumstances. That’s what Frank Sinatra taught me, and some of what he left in my soul. His beautiful enchanting voice was alerting my senses, pushing me to break into the horrors and fluctuations of reality, making me break down all barriers and restrictions that stand between me and my freedom. Sinatra’s voice, songs, and lyrics inspired me, his music crossed my soul, letting me know what it means to be influenced and inspired by someone without ever meeting them.

With his voice and songs, “Sinatra” shaped my artistic sentiment, and gave me the ability to taste colors and see melodies with all the meaning of the word vision. I was not alone falling into that musical magic, his lovers are numerous, his renewed memory every year confirms how deep his impact on the conscience of the world and its musical memory. One hundred years have passed since the birth of the most famous American singer “Frank Sinatra”, and his memory still ignites feelings of longing for that artist. He was known as the brave adventurer, and the lover. He was called a legend. He sang the most beautiful songs, danced, held parties around the world, doing everything his way, and people loved him as he is.

He is credited with renewing the American song, as it is today, since his fame began in the late 1930s, with the famous Big Band at the time. Frank Sinatra was born in 1915 in New Jersey, to Italian roots, he lived a miserable childhood to a mother of a strong character and a weak addicted father. His sudden rise began when he was in the prime of his youth, and he excelled in the field of composing and singing. With his rise, the incidents of his life went back and forth between successes, failures, suicide attempts, and an almost complete collapse in his personal life and marriage. Then, he suddenly return to win the Academy Award, achieving the most prominent artistic phenomenon known to the twentieth century – as stated in the biography narrated by the American journalist and novelist “James Kaplan”. A phenomenon that even surpassed “Elvis Presley” and the “Beatles.” He was the prince of girls’ dreams, and the most prominent example of the youth of that period.

His songs are a mixture of classics, and different styles. His movies are no less important than his songs, as he was a hero in more than 60 movies, and a producer of eight ones. He worked in a local newspaper during his study, and after graduating from school he started singing. He began to chant Bing Crosby songs in his spare time, before participating in the singing talent competition, and winning it to devote himself to singing in radio stations and nightclubs. Las Vegas embraced this creative boy more than anyone else. Frank Sinatra is one of twenty-two people to have “three stars” on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Perhaps his most famous song is “My Way,” which summarizes the life of that boy, the son of an Italian immigrant in the land of dreams, to become “Sinatra” the first teen singer.

He joined a number of orchestras, such as the “Trumponeist Orchestra Tommy Dorsey”. Joining this band had a great impact on its later successes, bringing its songs to the top of the list of the best songs. During the sixties, he co-starred in a number of movies, such as the hugely successful movie “Ocean’s Eleven”, and in 1954 he won an Academy Award for his movie “From Here to Eternity”. In 1971, he decided to retire from art and devote himself to his family, but he soon retracted his retirement in 1973 and ranked fifteenth in the polls for best albums. During the eighties, he focused on reviving artistic concerts, and in the nineties he made a duet that occupied the first list in the international singing arrangement. Then, for the second and last time, he announced his real retirement.

He passed away in 1998 after a long journey at the age of eighty-two years, most of which he spent in his musical and artistic revolution, until he left our world and his feet stopped dancing forever. Perhaps one of the most important features of Sinatra is that he was able, with his songs, to make people re-think in many of the problems of this era, in his way and style of rebellion against everything.

Rami Maki