Frank Sinatra’s landmark album Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! turned 70 this year. It was released in 1956, containing 15 of Sinatra’s classic (oh, that word again) covers, pulled together by Nelson Riddle, one of the great arrangers who helped to create the Sinatra sound.

Seventy years doesn’t seem all that long ago in the greater scheme of the long 20^th century’s chronology. I know it’s within easy memory of some of the subscribers to this blog. But let’s go back 70 years from the famed album, to 1886. From that perspective, 70 years seems somewhat longer, even though there would have been people around in 1956 who remember the 19^th century’s ninth decade.

These people shared an era when Brahms and Tchaikovsky hadn’t yet composed some of their best-known works, when Debussy, Richard Strauss or Puccini hadn’t composed anything of innovative significance, when people who once met Beethoven might still be around. Young folk in the 1880s wouldn’t have known about motor cars or recorded sound. Yet had they lived into the 1950s, they might have flown in a jet plane, and their copy of Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! would have been on vinyl LP.

Despite being a mainstream commercial album in 1956, it has now become part of the 1950s songbook. It was a bridge between the standard ballads, some dating back to the 1920s, on the one hand, and rock ‘n’ roll on the other, divergent ‘popular’ styles, though idioms which are now considered ‘classic’ in their own way. Today, there’s nothing ephemeral about Sinatra’s album, though back then, it might have seemed temporary once it fell off the newly-launched charts on both sides of the Atlantic.

Not surprisingly, vocalist Matt Ford, in his show ‘Sinatra and the Swing Legends’, held in the pretty market town of Malton as part of the Ryedale Festival, referenced the anniversary of Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! throughout what was a great evening.

Ford, renowned for his renditions of this type of repertoire, made clear that the show wasn’t a tribute act. Rather, it was something of a jam session with the eight fabulous guys of the Swing Legends Band, all great session musicians and seasoned jazzers, sharing music from the repertoires of Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr, Tony Bennett, Bobby Darin, and others.

Ford is an exemplary entertainer, and his easy voice demonstrates the type of breath and phrase control which is decidedly Sinatra-like. He managed some audience participation once or twice. Though it took a while for the capacity audience to let its hair down, that everyone seemed to know the tunes and the words, tells us to what extent this repertoire has not only embedded itself within our culture, but that it’s become, yes, classic.

Malton’s Milton Rooms is a pleasant venue, looking out onto the bonny marketplace. Sound-mixing (i.e., the PA) and lighting weren’t always the slickest, but this didn’t mar an excellent gig.

Less than two decades separate Johannes Brahms’s death from Frank Sinatra’s birth. As the years progress, we can see that there’s far more that unites the high art of Frankie and Jonny than divides them, and as long as we continue to perform the Brahms symphonies, we’ll also still be listening to one of the great vocalists explain, to slightly paraphrase the song, what makes him feel so young.