Steve Lippia honors Frank Sinatra on Jan. 16
Even before Steve Lippia knew he wanted to be a singer, he appreciated Frank Sinatra.
“I wasn’t a Sinatra-phile,” Lippia says. “I knew a little bit about him. But I knew I had tremendous respect for him as a singer.”
Lippia also recognized Sinatra’s talent as an actor. “When I was 7 or 8, I went to sneak into a theater, and I saw the end of a Sinatra movie, ‘The Joker Is Wild.’ Even as a little kid, he knocked me out.”
Life took a number of turns for Lippia. He went to law school and later worked on Wall Street.
But as he followed a career in business, he realized that he wanted to be a performer himself. On weekends, he would take gigs as a singer “for kicks,” he says.
More than 20 years ago, Lippia moved to Florida and began singing more frequently. “I was singing standards,” he says. “It wasn’t just the songs (associated with) Sinatra. But more and more, people would ask for Sinatra.”
Now Lippia is drawing on both his interest in Sinatra and his passion for performing. Backed by a 10-piece orchestra, he will perform an all-Sinatra program at the Mayo Performing Arts Center this Saturday, Jan. 16.
Billed as a Sinatra Centennial Celebration, the program will run the gamut from Sinatra’s early days as a vocalist for the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra (“I’ll Never Smile Again”) through his last recordings on the “Duets” CD in 1993.
Lippia never met Sinatra. But he did have the opportunity to learn about Sinatra’s music from the inside.
In the late 1990s, Lippia was tapped to tour with a 21-piece orchestra that was led by Vincent Falcone Jr., who served as Sinatra’s pianist and music director in the decade before the Chairman of the Board’s death in 1998.
“That was a huge leap for me,” says Lippia. “I thought I was capable as a singer. But I didn’t realize how focused, how intense you had to be to put these songs across.”
From Falcone, Lippia also grew to understand the importance of the lyric. “Sinatra would let the lyric tell itself,” he says. “You have to have emotional investment in the song.”
Several years ago, Lippia devised a program called “Simply Sinatra,” which concentrated on the songs from the 1950s to the 1990s. That included material from such classic Sinatra albums as “Only the Lonely” and “In the Wee Small Hours.”
But with the approach of Sinatra’s centennial (on Dec. 12, 2015), Lippia felt the need to come up with a more comprehensive concert. “I wanted to look at his full career,” he says.
Lippia realizes the scope of the task he set for himself. “To take a lifetime of music and reduce it to two hours is a dicey thing to do,” he says.
“We go in roughly chronological order,” he continues. “But I’m not locked into that. I don’t want to end up doing five ballads in a row.”
“This isn’t a history class,” Lippia says. “We intersperse the songs with contextual dialogue. I tell anecdotes about the songs and how they came to be written. People have told me they love those stories.”
But though he has no interest in coming across as an academic, Lippia does hope that his audience comes away with a renewed respect for the man who is considered one of the defining voices of the past 100 years.
“Sinatra drew from his Italian heritage, from growing up in the early 20th Century, from having his heart broken,” Lippia says. “That all came out in his music.”
“Sinatra had a high musical IQ,” Lippia concludes. “He brought a depth of understanding to the music that was unparalleled. He had the breathing, the phrasing, the intellect, the instinct. He had it all.”
SINATRA CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION STARRING STEVE LIPPIA
WHEN: 8 p.m. Saturday
WHERE: Mayo Performing Arts Center, 100 South St., Morristown
TICKETS: $39 to $59
INFO: 973-539-8008 or
www.mayoarts.org