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It is a pleasure to introduce Charles L. (Chuck) Granata, my colleague whose fascinating career combines an unwavering dedication to music, including the artistry of Frank Sinatra and The Great American Songbook, as well as an honorable commitment to his past involvement in law enforcement.

Chuck Granata's name is undoubtedly familiar to many Frank Sinatra fans, and it is with good reason.

He is known as one of the most knowledgable Sinatraphiles in the music industry, having produced the ever popular "Nancy for Frank" program, broadcast on the Siriusly Sinatra channel via SiriusXM Radio, and hosted affectionately by Frank Sinatra's daughter, Nancy Sinatra.

But that's just one part of Chuck Granata's eclectic musical journey.

Besides being a producer, he is a well-respected music historian, archivist, and author of two highly regarded books, Sessions With Sinatra: Frank Sinatra and the Art of Recording, as well as Wouldn't It Be Nice: Brian Wilson and the Making of The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds. In addition, he is the creative host of the broadcast program, Sinatra Standard Time on KSDS-FM Radio, which also streams live at Jazz88.org.

Recently Dana Polan, the Martin Scorsese Professor of Cinema Studies at NYU, interviewed Chuck, as part of a special event celebration this past December. (Karen Morris presented a tribute to Christopher Riddle and the interview with Chuck Granata.)

Professor Dana chatted with Chuck for over an hour, in a room overflowing with delightfully curious Sinatra fans, and began his light-hearted introduction by sharing a story on how they both initially connected.

"What we're going to do today is chat with Chuck about his career in music and as a writer about music, and his wonderful book, Sessions with Sinatra.

But first, just to introduce Chuck. He's a music writer and a music producer. He does a lot of mastering and remastering of albums.

Interestingly, some people may not know this, but before being in the music business, he was a New Jersey policeman. And I'd like to make the joke, which some of you have heard.

If you're pulled over by someone like Chuck and you're listening to Bing Crosby, that's a 3 point violation. But, you get extra points, positive points, if you're listening to Frank Sinatra. And, what do you get for Dean? Point and a half!

On how we got together, about 8 years ago, maybe even more, I was teaching a Sinatra course for the first time, and I wanted to learn more about him. And the way I learn about a topic is to teach it. I thought Sinatra is so important to the 20th century, so I'll teach about Frank Sinatra. I did not know what the critical literature or the scholarly literature on Sinatra was. But, then I came across this book, Sessions of Sinatra, which is on the production of the albums and the songs, and what happens when Sinatra would go into the recording studio, who he worked with.

So I looked the guy (the author) up, Chuck Granata, and I sent him an email. Would you come to my class? Within 45 seconds, the fastest reply I've ever gotten to an email, I would love to come to your class!

A welcoming and continuing friendship had begun between Chuck and Dana due to a sincere and ongoing interest in Frank Sinatra! The interview got underway as Dana asked Chuck about Frank Sinatra's musical connection to the UK.

Before we go into your career trajectory, one more thing. Karen is writing up a report on today's event for the Dean Martin Association, which is a UK publisher. Can you talk a little bit about Sinatra in London, Sinatra in England?

Sure. One of the real landmarks of Sinatra's career, and it's particularly important because it came at a moment when his career was pretty low in 1950, is that he appeared at the London Palladium, and he sold out the shows and made a splash, which communicated to the world that he was still a great singer and there was still interest in his music. And if you remember, between 1950 and 1952, he suffered a tremendous slide, a downward spiral in his work in the United States. Columbia Records dropped him.

He had no film deal. He had no radio show for a short period of time. He had no wife. He had divorced Nancy Senior and married Ava Gardner, and they had a very, tumultuous relationship. And he really wasn't selling records.

Mitch Miller had entered the picture at Columbia Records and brought with him this new style of music, which was hokey novelty numbers like Mambo Italiano, which was a big hit for Rosie Clooney, and all of these novelty-type songs that Guy Mitchell was singing, and the upstarts like Rosemary and Tony Bennett. And Mitch, for all of his foibles is a very interesting guy because he was musically brilliant.

Mitch signs Johnny Mathis, Tony Bennett, Rosemary Clooney, and Guy Mitchell, and he proceeds to try and cast their career in the image of Frankie Lane. But Sinatra had already been at Columbia for almost 10 years, and it was really 8 years at that point, and he did not want to sing those songs. And he told Mitch, I'm not singing that crap. He said I want to sing Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart and Johnny Mercer. And Mitch said, Frank, that's not where it's at. So they bumped heads.

Yet they did it Frank's way for a while. And then when the sales of his records were so abysmal, Mitch tried to get Frank to record a few novelty numbers. One of which was the worst song ever written, Mama Will Bark. And it has become the example of Sinatra's lowest moment as an entertainer, and deservedly so.

And you talk about dichotomy and a real polar opposite on a sound recording. You have a 45 or a 78 RPM single. And on one side, you have the most beautiful and dramatic reading of a truly great love song. And on the other side, you have this inane performance with a dog, it's just terrible.

So at that moment, right around the time that he recorded Mama Will Bark, he gets this engagement at the Palladium in London, and everybody thought it was going to be a bomb and he ended up killing it. Then he returns to the United States, but had some problems with his throat. He was on stage at the Copa one night in, I think it was March of 1950. And he went to reach for a note on stage at the Copa. He had a vocal hemorrhage, and couldn't sing for over a month. But then, from that point on, he started to slowly rebuild his career.

By the mid-fifties he had undergone this transformation and become a swingin' sophisticate. And everybody loved him. He was back on top.

But his real apex in terms of London and his work was when in 1962, he concluded his world tour for children's charities there.

After a performance at Royal Festival Hall in London, he recorded an album with Robert Farnon, who was a great British arranger and noted for his strings.

The album was Great Songs from Great Britain. It became a landmark in Sinatra's work principally because he worked with Farnon on that record.

Farnon was a god in the eyes of all of the arrangers in America. Johnny Mandel told me he learned how to write strings by listening to Robert Farnon.

Billy May said he listened to Robert Farnon. Every major American arranger and composer of music in this genre said that Farnon was an inspiration.

But how did Chuck's childhood musical interests lead to his fascination with Sinatra?

Dana encouraged Chuck to tell his story about an early love of music.

I was a very odd child, and I don't know how these things happen. Sometimes someone is born or very early on has this fixation with something, and my fixation was records and record players.

I was a year old, and I would sit and watch the record spin, and I drove my parents, my cousins, my aunts and uncles crazy when a 1, 2, or 3-year-old loves records and he just wants to listen to them all the time. That's exactly what happened. I broke more record players in the first 5 years of my life probably than anyone else in the world!

But the fact is I gravitated towards music and sound recordings very early in my life, and that passion has never changed.

I would sit and listen to my mom's records as a very young child. She had a pretty diverse record collection. All the Sinatra Columbia records were there. Classical records by Bernstein, Ormandy, Bruno Walter. International music.

She was a Spanish teacher, so she had a lot of Latin music. And I destroyed her whole collection, literally!

I just had such an appreciation for music. And of course, I listened to the radio. I listened to what my mother was listening to, which was WNEW in New York, which was the big band station.

My cousin, who is 7 years older than me, was playing the piano, and she gravitated towards jazz and big band and George Gershwin and Rhapsody in Blue, one of my favorite pieces to play on the record player.

When I was in elementary school, I started taking drum lessons, then I started taking piano lessons, ended up in the school band, orchestra, marching band, and that was it. But I didn't pursue music as a profession simply because I had stage fright.

I did not feel comfortable getting up in front of people and performing. I was okay if I was part of the marching band. Although as a drummer, you're pretty much the section that they're looking at because you play constantly. But the reality is, to get behind a drum set and do a drum solo on the stage, it just made me sick, so I just didn't do music as a career.

Although his passion for music was deeply rooted, Chuck simultaneously discovered another equally personal passion. One in which he would help others.

I started working in EMS, which I loved. I was going to become a paramedic. I started working in the city of Elizabeth where the police department ran EMS. The first day I was there I had already worked as an EMT in a volunteer squad, but the first day I did professional EMS in Elizabeth, we had a homicide call, and I knew right away I wanted to be a cop. So I changed direction. I became a police officer.

His path from policeman to entering the world of Sinatra music was about to be realized.

About 2 years into my career, I got a call from Will Friedwald, a good friend who was writing for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. He had been contacted by Sony Music, which owned Columbia Records, and they were going to do a complete Frank Sinatra box set on CD. And, they needed someone as a consultant to guide them in the studio, what masters to use, and then they needed individual photos and, memorabilia for the actual book. So I went to the meeting after work.

I was still in my police pants and boots, and the guy looked at me like I was a little crazy. But, he ended up asking me to get him a pair of paratrooper boots, which I did!

But basically, I laid everything out on their conference room table, and I said if it were me, I would do a, b, c, and d, and his eyes rolled out of his head because I laid out all kinds of stuff, records, and photos that I really liked collecting.

Chuck's zeal for collecting continued.

I had started collecting Sinatra music probably around 1981 or 82, right out of high school. And what I wanted to do in the beginning was replace all of the Sinatra records that my mom had, that I destroyed.

Remember (back then) we didn't have CDs, we didn't have Spotify or iTunes, and I had another pivotal moment for me. I'm biking around the neighborhood, throwing newspapers on people's front doorsteps because I was a paper boy. I was about 12 or 13 years old, and I came upon a yard sale. It's a Saturday afternoon.

Of course, I gravitate right to the records, and there's all these great Sinatra albums that I had never seen before. All the Capital and Reprise albums. But, I don't have any money on me. And I said to the guy, who turned out to be a state trooper, by the way, 'can you hold these for me? I'm going to go home and get some money.' So I raced home. Forgot about the rest of the papers. I raced home.

I got $5. I went back, and I bought all of the records. And then that afternoon, I put on a Swingin Affair, and I heard The Lonesome Road, and I was done. It was a Sinatra that I really hadn't heard much before, and that was the moment that I said, I'm in. All in.

As a youngster, Chuck had truly discovered his love of Sinatra's music, while endlessly adding to his growing and treasured musical library by researching tirelessly.

By the time I was getting out of high school, I was starting to replace all these records that I had destroyed.

At that time, there was no Internet. The record stores never ever had used records. There was no such thing as a used record store, not like they have today.

I had to go to the library and look at phone books from Chicago and LA and even some international phone books and find the names and addresses of record shops.

By that point, they had just started to have specialists who dealt in used records, mostly for jazz collectors.

And I would target those stores. I would send a list of all the albums I was looking for, and I would mail it. That was it. No email. I would mail it, and, hopefully, in the next month, I'd get a response.

And I did get responses, and I started buying these albums. I thought, wow, these are things that need to be preserved. And I started to find that there were the 45 EPs with different covers, and I was really intrigued. And that's when I really started collecting. I amassed a collection of hundreds of Sinatra records, sheet music, posters and all kinds of stuff at a time when there was no eBay, there was no Internet, and no email.

Dana takes the conversation further: Let's talk about how you go from collecting and consulting to writing. So, your first book, was this the Sinatra book or was it the Beach Boys version?

It was my Sinatra book. I started at Sony Music. It was the fall of 92. That box set, the 12 CD box set, it's the blue box. They call it Big Blue. That came out in October of 93, and it got great press. It got great reviews for the sound, for the presentation. I wrote not a word inside the book. I did lay out the book with the art director and did all the background work.

I also worked in the studio on remastering with the producer at the time Didier Deutsch, who was a close friend. And then 2 or 3 months later, the guy that I told you about, Gary Pacheco, who invited me in, said, I want to take you to lunch. And we went to lunch and he said I want to make you the project director for all the Sinatra stuff that we would like to do. So you're in charge, and I was like, I'm a cop from Livingston, New Jersey.

It was one of those moments where you're like, this is a dream of a lifetime. I felt as if I prepared my whole life for this.

Chuck's dream becomes a reality!

All of a sudden, this dream drops in my lap. And from that point on, it just grew.

I started to develop the catalog and reinvigorate and refresh Sinatra's Columbia work, I started to write liner notes. Now at the time, before I even went to Sony Music, my friend Will was writing a book about Frank Sinatra, and then I was planning to write the book that I eventually wrote.

So we were doing interviews. He was doing interviews. I was doing interviews separately with musicians, songwriters, engineers and producers. And one day he said, why don't we just pool our resources? Our books are not going be in competition, but we can help each other, we can cite each other, but we'll do the interviews together, and we did that.

As research on his Sessions With Sinatra book continued, a surprise phone call arrived from Frank Sinatra's daughter, Nancy!

I had already been researching my Sinatra book. And I started writing liner notes, and then I got this phone call from Nancy Sinatra.

I lived in Clifton, New Jersey. I think I was working midnights, and this phone call wakes me up in the morning and I answered it. And the person says, Chuck? This is Nancy Sinatra. And I said, well, hello, Nancy. I'd met her one time in the studio, a year before.

And she said, I just wanted to call to tell you I love the work that you're doing with my dad's music at Columbia. I love the way you write. You really know the music, and I'm working on a reissue, a new edition of my book on my father and she said I'd like you to help me. And I'm like, sure! And she said, can you meet me at the Friars Club next week? And, I said of course, I can. So I took a day off of work and I met her at the Friars Club and we became fast friends.

I wrote the essay for her deluxe edition of her book, which included 4 CDs, one from each of his labels. We worked on that for a few months talking about the songs we would include because they had to be truly connected to Frank and his family. So She's Funny That Way was included on the Columbia CD because Frank used to sing that to Nancy Senior.

We basically put all the songs together and then came up with a story that connected all the songs and the reason that they were on this package, which was Nancy's homage to her dad. That really started me with writing.

At the same time, the book came out, Nancy called me one night and she said, do you know anyone who I could take on the CBS morning show to talk about the book and my father? And I said, oh, sure, you could you could invite Sid Mark. And she goes, No. No. No. And then she says, I was thinking of you.

And I'm like, me? You want me to go on national television with you? Really?

And again, these are the kinds of things that really cemented my credibility. Nancy brought me on NPR, and then NPR started to call me and use me for all kinds of programs.

I got other TV gigs doing Sinatra commentary At NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, CNN. I was very lucky. And my Sinatra book came out, and there were 2 people that I wanted to involve. Phil Ramone, who had just produced duets and whose historywith Sinatra went back to 1967, and I wanted Nancy to write the afterword. And they did that, and that was it. My book got great reviews.

From Sinatra to The Beach Boys, Chuck relays more of his musical odyssey.

I got a call from a professor of English who was a big Sinatra fan, and he said,
I'm doing a compendium of essays on Frank Sinatra, and I love the essay you wrote for the best of the Columbia years box set, which was a cut-down of the blue box. It was a 4 CD set of greatest hits. He said, I'd love you to contribute to that book, and I did. And, that really was the stepping stone to my full book (Sessions With Sinatra).

It got great reviews. I got quotes firsthand quotes from Quincy Jones, Rosemary Clooney, David Wilde from Rolling Stone, all praising the book. They actually read it. They were participants in the interviews, some of them.

That was the start. And then, the next thing I know, I get a phone call and there's a publisher in the UK, and they ask, what do you want to write for your second book? And I'm thinking, I hadn't even thought about a second book. And they said, well, what artist would you write about if you had the choice of anyone? And I already knew.

I said Brian Wilson. And he said, why? I said, because like Frank Sinatra, Brian Wilson controlled every facet of the Beach Boys music. He developed that sound. He orchestrated the actual instrumental backings even though he couldn't write music.

He created those vocal harmonies in the studio layer by layer telling the other guys how to sing. I said he was a genius like Sinatra was. And he said good because I want to include the album Pet Sounds in my series The Vinyl Frontier, which is about the making of classic albums. Then he starts to tell me, well we have books about the Beatles' White Album and Jimi Hendrix' Are You Experienced? I said, wow. Oh, and Sergeant Pepper. I thought I'm going to be in pretty crazy company. So I embarked on writing the Beach Boys book, and, I had a great time doing it because I love the music. I knew the music, and I got to really connect.

I know this word is overused. But, when you talk about genius, Brian Wilson's name and the picture of him should be in the dictionary next to the definition. This is a guy who just had this incredible musical intuition beyond even Sinatra.

Chuck continued to discuss and reveal aspects of writing his book about Brian and The Beach Boys, which shifted the conversation for the rest of the interview.

To learn more, consider reading Sessions With Sinatra: Frank Sinatra and the Art of Recording, as

well as Wouldn't It Be Nice: Brian Wilson and the Making of The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds.

In closing, an appreciative note of thanks to Professor Dana Polan, for being a gracious host full of engaging questions, resulting in a compelling interview.

And a hearty thanks to Sinatra Scholar and compatriot, Charles L. (Chuck) Granata, for entertaining us by sharing candid personal and professional stories, and acclaimed career highlights, in a charming and thoughtful discussion.

For more information about Chuck Granata, visit his website, https:// charleslgranata.com