For Sinatra TV special, young stars do it his way
Turns out every singer has a little Sinatra in there somewhere.
Well, almost. At least one doesn’t. We’ll get back to that. But when it comes to today’s star-packed, prime-time celebration of Frank Sinatra standards?
“I know from my years of doing these shows with these people,” says Ken Ehrlich, who by “shows” means the Grammy Awards, which he has produced since 1980.
“Zac (Brown) is a pretty good example. Zac wants to sing like Sinatra,” he says.
“You wind up sitting in a rehearsal hall with them and they’re working on a song you’re doing (for the Grammys). And then the mood changes for a minute, and all of a sudden, out comes ‘I’ve Got the World on a String.’
“You just don’t know where it’s coming from.”
Wherever they find it, they will need it today at Wynn Las Vegas, where “Sinatra 100 — An All-Star Grammy Concert” tapes a two-hour special to air Sunday on CBS.
The stars range from those with established credentials in the Sinatra school of swing — Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga, Celine Dion, Harry Connick Jr. and Seth MacFarlane — to the less obvious Brown, Adam Levine and Usher.
Falling somewhere in the middle are the big, versatile voices of Garth Brooks and spouse Trisha Yearwood, Juanes, Alicia Keys, John Legend and Carrie Underwood.
The special is the only authorized TV concert marking Sinatra’s 100th birthday on Dec. 12, and it’s produced in cooperation with the Sinatra family.
Ehrlich says it was the family who “highly recommended” the producers talk to Wynn Resorts Chairman Steve Wynn about hosting the special in Las Vegas.
Wynn’s Sinatra connection dates to the 1980s, when the Chairman of the Board gave branding prestige to his Golden Nuggets in Las Vegas and Atlantic City.
“Part of the deal was I’d pick him up in Palm Springs and take him (to Atlantic City or Las Vegas) on Thursday and bring him home Sunday. We had all these wonderful evenings flying together,” Wynn recalled in 2010, when he hosted “Sinatra Dance With Me” in the same theater as today’s taping.
Encore is home to the Sinatra restaurant, a standing tribute to the singer synonymous with Las Vegas from his 1951 debut at the Desert Inn — where Wynn Las Vegas now stands — through his final show at the MGM Grand in 1994.
Wynn “said he was going to help us with the talent side, and to his credit he was instrumental in delivering Garth. Obviously there’s a relationship there,” Ehrlich says, thanks to Brooks’ years of solo-acoustic concerts in the same theater.
Sinatra won’t skip his own party either. Charles Pignone, Sinatra biographer and family archivist, helped the producers assemble the narrative with clips, including a 1965 interview with Walter Cronkite.
Ehrlich — who also directs Dion’s show at Caesars Palace — uses Sinatra’s extracted voice alongside the living stars in some medleys, which fit in more songs while doubling as a nod to Sinatra’s own TV history.
Memories of his TV duets in the 1950s were, “in a way … the beginnings of my Grammy moments, although I certainly didn’t recognize it at the time,” the producer says.
Bennett also took part in the 1995 special “Sinatra: 80 Years My Way,” a birthday celebration taped in Los Angeles three years before Sinatra’s death. That guest list tilted toward contemporaries such as Vic Damone, Don Rickles and Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme.
But this time, “there are enough young artists on the show that I’m definitely hoping they will bring a young audience,” Ehrlich says. “I feel it’s important that this legacy carry on.”
And the stars are doing it his way. Bob Dylan’s recent “Shadows in the Night” is but one example of stripping the midcentury standards down to the point where they are only “Sinatra” by their collective association. But Sunday’s show will stick to the classic big-band arrangements.
“I think one of the joys of this show is going to be hearing these guys sing to those arrangements,” Ehrlich says. “Most of the artists have said, ‘Wow! I get to use the original chart?'”
But yes, “there was one artist who I would rather not mention, who basically said, ‘I don’t have a feeling for Sinatra.’ A very young artist” who turned down the show saying, “If I do something, it’s got to be somebody I really kind of get.”
“At some point,” said Ehrlich, a Sinatra fan since he was 12, “it just kind of taught me a lesson that what I believe isn’t necessarily universal.”
— Read more from Mike Weatherford at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com and follow @Mikeweatherford on Twitter.