Is Frank Sinatra Jazz? His Genre and the Case For and Against

Not by the strict test, but he came closer than most pop singers of his era. Frank Sinatra is classified as a traditional pop singer: he rarely scatted and stayed close to the melody the songwriter wrote, while jazz singers treat the melody as material to improvise on. Yet he learned his trade in swing-era big bands, recorded with Count Basie and Duke Ellington, and phrased so rhythmically that jazz musicians, Miles Davis among them, studied his records. The fair answer is that Sinatra was a pop singer who swung like a jazz musician, and the evidence on both sides follows.

What Genre Was Frank Sinatra?

Sinatra’s genre is usually given as traditional pop, sometimes called classic pop: the pre-rock style built on songs from Broadway, Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley, sung over orchestral arrangements. Reference listings tend to add swing, big band and jazz next to it, which is where the confusion starts. His success in the mid-1950s with lightly swinging big-band backing set the pattern for what is sometimes called swingin’ pop, a sound that Bobby Darin, Dean Martin and Nat King Cole also used.

Musicians who admire him tend to put it carefully. “If you asked him, he probably wouldn’t refer to himself as a jazz musician, yet many jazz musicians credit him with having made tremendous contributions to this art form,” David Finck wrote in a 1995 Village Voice essay on Sinatra’s swing. That split, pop singer by category and jazz musician by feel, is why eJazzNews ranks him third among the greatest male jazz singers while noting that the argument is not settled.

What Makes a Singer a Jazz Singer?

The usual dividing line is improvisation. A jazz singer treats the written melody as a starting point and changes it in performance, by scatting, by reshaping the line or by inventing variations on the spot, the way a horn player would. It is the same skill instrumentalists build, explained in our guide to how jazz improvisation works.

The benchmark singers make the idea concrete. Ella Fitzgerald turned “How High the Moon” at her 1960 Berlin concert into a long scat solo that quotes more than a dozen other songs, and at the same show she made up new words to “Mack the Knife” after forgetting the lyrics; the recordings, released by Verve as Ella in Berlin, won her two Grammys. Billie Holiday drew her style from jazz instrumentalists, changed how singers handle phrasing and tempo, and was known for her improvisation.

The second test is rhythm. A jazz singer swings: phrases land behind or ahead of the beat and lock in with the rhythm section instead of floating on top of it. Sinatra passes this test easily, and that partial pass is the whole reason the question exists.

The Case Against Calling Sinatra a Jazz Singer

On melody, Sinatra falls short of the jazz standard. There are very few recordings of him scat singing, and the changes he made to a tune were slight deviations from the written line, not new melodies. Finck credited him with “tremendous regard for the intentions of the composer and lyricist.” Sinatra’s priority was the lyric and the story it told, which is the job of an interpreter of popular song rather than an improviser.

Much of the jazz on his best records was written into the arrangements. On “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” recorded for Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! (Capitol, 1956), Nelson Riddle‘s chart features a slide trombone solo by Milt Bernhart. When Sinatra re-recorded the song for Reprise in 1963, Dick Nash took the solo. On these records the solo space belongs to the band, and Sinatra’s part is the song itself.

His awards point the same way. Sinatra won the Grammy for Album of the Year three times, for Come Dance with Me! (1959), September of My Years (1965) and A Man and His Music (1965), Record of the Year for “Strangers in the Night” in 1967, and Best Traditional Pop Vocal Performance for Duets II in 1996. None of his Grammys came in a jazz category. His biggest later hits, “Strangers in the Night” and “My Way,” are pop records by any definition.

The Case For Sinatra as a Jazz Singer

Sinatra learned to sing in jazz orchestras. He joined Harry James’s band in 1939 and sang with Tommy Dorsey’s from January 1940 until 1942. Saxophonist Jerry Dodgion, who toured with Sinatra in Red Norvo’s group in 1959 and 1960, remembered Sinatra explaining what he took from Dorsey: he used to sit on the bandstand and “watch the way Dorsey’s back would fill up with air between phrases.” By May 1941 Sinatra topped the male singer polls in both Billboard and DownBeat.

His most important vocal model was a jazz singer. “It is Billie Holiday who was, and still remains, the greatest single musical influence on me,” he told Ebony magazine in 1958. Smithsonian magazine, marking Lester Young’s centenary, also counted Sinatra among the musicians influenced by Young’s lyrical, flowing tenor saxophone.

Rhythmically, he thought like an instrumentalist. Finck argued that the key to swinging lies more in where a singer stops a note than in where it starts, and that Sinatra used hard consonants to end notes cleanly so they became part of the groove. With the Basie band, Finck wrote, Sinatra sang rhythmic figures the way the band played them, which is why It Might as Well Be Swing and Sinatra at the Sands are “among the favorite recordings of jazz musicians.” In the same piece, saxophonist Bob Berg recalled Miles Davis telling him to “check out the way Frank phrases,” and Micky Weisman of Sinatra’s management team said Davis told him he “got a lot of his phrasing from listening to Frank’s records.”

He also kept jazz company for decades. In December 1946 he sang “Sweet Lorraine” with the Metronome All-Stars, a studio band chosen from the magazine’s readers’ poll, with Nat King Cole, Coleman Hawkins, Johnny Hodges and Buddy Rich in the lineup. He played the Newport Jazz Festival in 1965, made three albums with the Count Basie Orchestra between 1962 and 1966, and recorded with Duke Ellington’s orchestra in December 1967. In 1998, DownBeat readers voted him into the magazine’s Hall of Fame, the same honor given to Holiday, Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan.

Why the Question Keeps Coming Up

Part of the answer is timing. Swing was a style of jazz and, from the mid-1930s, also America’s most popular music. By the early 1940s singers were becoming the main attraction of the big bands, and in Tommy Dorsey’s band that singer was Sinatra. When the swing era wound down and bebop turned jazz into a fast, complex music for close listening rather than dancing, jazz and pop went separate ways. Sinatra stayed with the swing-era sound and carried it into the LP era with Nelson Riddle and Billy May, so his records sound like a time before the line was drawn.

The other part is repertoire. Sinatra sang the Great American Songbook, the songs of Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Irving Berlin and Harold Arlen that jazz singers also built careers on. Ella Fitzgerald recorded eight Song Book sets for Verve between 1956 and 1964, starting with Cole Porter. Many of those songs are now the standards jazz musicians still play, and the shared material makes the two kinds of singer sound like one genre. The song does not settle the question; what the singer does with it does.

Where to Hear the Jazz Side of Sinatra

To judge for yourself, start with the recordings that put him closest to jazz:

• “Sweet Lorraine” with the Metronome All-Stars (1946): Sinatra in a poll-winners’ jazz band with Nat King Cole, Coleman Hawkins and Johnny Hodges.
• Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! (Capitol, 1956): Nelson Riddle’s up-tempo charts, including “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”
• With the Red Norvo Quintet: Live in Australia, 1959 (Blue Note, 1997): a small jazz group instead of an orchestra, taped in Melbourne in 1959 and released 38 years later.
• Sinatra-Basie (Reprise, 1962): his first album with the Count Basie Orchestra, arranged by Neal Hefti.
• It Might as Well Be Swing (Reprise, 1964): Basie again, now arranged by Quincy Jones, with “Fly Me to the Moon.”
• Sinatra at the Sands (Reprise, 1966): his first commercially released live album, recorded in Las Vegas with Basie’s band and conducted and arranged by Jones.
• Francis A. & Edward K. (Reprise, 1968): Duke Ellington’s orchestra with Billy May arrangements, mostly at slow tempos.

The Verdict

Sinatra was a traditional pop singer with a jazz musician’s sense of time. By the improvisation test he was not a jazz singer in the way Fitzgerald, Holiday or Sarah Vaughan were: he did not rewrite melodies on the spot, and he left the solos to the band. By almost every other measure, his training in the big bands, his rhythm, his collaborators and the jazz musicians who learned from him, he belongs in any serious discussion of jazz singing.

For singers who meet both tests, start with our list of the greatest jazz singers of all time and our ranking of the women who defined jazz vocals. Holiday, the singer Sinatra named as his biggest influence, is on both, and listening to her next to him is the quickest way to hear where the line falls.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Frank Sinatra considered a jazz singer?

Usually not in the strict sense. Sinatra is classified as a traditional pop singer because he rarely scatted or improvised on the melody, which is the main test for jazz singing. He is still discussed alongside jazz singers because of his swing phrasing, his big-band background and his albums with Count Basie and Duke Ellington, and DownBeat readers voted him into the magazine’s Hall of Fame in 1998.

What genre is Frank Sinatra?

Traditional pop, also called classic pop: popular songs from Broadway, Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley sung with orchestral arrangements. His up-tempo records add swing and big band, and his albums with Count Basie are often listed as vocal jazz.

Is Frank Sinatra jazz or blues?

Closer to jazz than to blues, but strictly neither. His repertoire was the Great American Songbook rather than the blues tradition, and his link to jazz comes from swing rhythm and the jazz bands and arrangers he worked with.

What type of jazz is Frank Sinatra?

If he is filed under jazz at all, it is swing. He came out of the big bands of Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, and his up-tempo records with Nelson Riddle, Billy May and Count Basie use swing-era big-band rhythm rather than the language of bebop or later modern jazz.

Is “Fly Me to the Moon” jazz?

The song began as a cabaret ballad in 3/4 time, written by Bart Howard in 1954 as “In Other Words,” and jazz and cabaret singers recorded it before Sinatra did. Quincy Jones rearranged it in 4/4 for Sinatra and the Count Basie Orchestra on It Might as Well Be Swing (1964), and that version, a pop singer in front of a swinging jazz big band, is the one most people know.