Standards, by singers who aren’t

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“The Goonies” and “Die Hard” actor Robert Davi recorded Sinatra songs on his debut disc.

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Updated: January 12, 2012 8:06AM

Tony Bennett calls it “America’s greatest contribution to the arts.”

He was speaking of the Great American Songbook, the iconic melodies and impossibly perfect lyrics that helped define American pop and jazz from the early 1900s to the late 1950s.

To Bennett, the songs — from Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Vernon Duke, George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Hoagy Carmichael and the like — are like breathing, he told the Sun-Times earlier this year. He wouldn’t know how to live without them.

Artists including Michael Buble, Rod Stewart and Harry Connick Jr. have been doing their damnedest to make the music cool for a whole new generation. And that bandwagon is picking up more passengers along the way, in some very unexpected places.

“Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane, the voice of Peter and Stewie on the Fox TV hit, earlier this year released “Music Is Better Than Words” (Universal Republic), a collection of show tunes and standards recorded with a 40-piece orchestra and the microphone once used by perhaps the greatest champion of the Great American Songbook: Frank Sinatra.

“I saw the [1987] movie ‘Radio Days’ when I was in high school,” MacFarlane told spinner.com. “That was a movie that took a lot of great songs from that era and put them into a narrative framework that made them, in many ways, accessible and interesting and meaningful to people who had just really never been exposed to that kind of music. It worked for me.

“I eventually sought out what was going on in popular jazz in the early and late ’50s, which is kind of what this album is most evocative of. To me, that was the golden era of popular jazz orchestration. It was very lush, rich and complex, but at the same time it was very accessible. It hadn’t reached the point where it was for the jazz elite where it was so esoteric and so dissonant, that you couldn’t be Joe Schmo and appreciate it.”

Seems it’s raining tuxedo-clad singers.

“America’s Got Talent” viewers got a taste of how relevant the standards still are when a former car wash employee, 37-year-old Landau Eugene Murphy Jr., belted out Rat Pack-era tunes like nobody’s business — and walked away with the show’s $1 million prize in September. His lush vocal stylings notwithstanding, it was Murphy’s signature dreadlocks that brought a cool new dimension to the word crooner.

His album of standards, “That’s Life” (produced by yet another Great American Songbook champion, Steve Tyrell), was released in late November.

“The only thing that’s missing in Vegas is the Rat Pack,” he told People.com. “That’s it. Right now you’ve got Michael Buble, Harry Connick Jr., and then you have Landau Eugene Jr. Put one more guy with us and you’ve got the whole Rat Pack.”

Maybe that “one more guy” is veteran actor Robert Davi (“The Goonies,” “Die Hard,” “Licence to Kill,” “Kill the Irishman” “Stargate: Atlantis,” “Profiler”).

Davi, also a classically trained singer, released “Davi Sings Sinatra: On the Road to Romance” (Sun Lion) in October, a collection of some of Sinatra’s biggest hits, in homage to the iconic singer and the Great American Songbook.

Recorded at Capitol Records with a 30-piece orchestra, and produced by Phil Ramone with arrangements by Nic. tenbroeck, the album finds Davi beautifully melodic throughout, giving the songs fresh, new appeal and depth.

Davi, born in Astoria, Queens (the same New York borough that gave the world Tony Bennett), says music, including the standards, fuels his soul.

“In eighth grade I started singing in church,” Davi said. “But I was into athletics and the drama club and just singing in the shower after football practice.”

Which is where Davi the singer, was, well, “discovered.”

“One of the nuns at my high school was passing in the hall and heard me singing from the locker room showers and she later told me to join the glee club,” Davi said with a chuckle. “At that time, glee club was not cool like the TV show today makes it out to be. But I went. I was a defensive tackle and there I am in glee club. But it was 80 percent girls so I was in heaven.”

Davi eventually studied music formally, including a master class with the Italian tenor Tito Gobbi.

“I loved opera. I loved language. I loved Shakespeare and the poetry of Dylan Thomas,” Davi said. “Classical music just stirred something in me. And I wanted to study with the best, so I wrote him a letter telling him I wasn’t getting the training that I wanted. To my surprise, he wrote me back and said that he was coming to the Met for the season and that he would meet with me.”

Davi sang for the tenor and was invited to Gobbi’s master class in Florence, followed by study at the Juilliard and with legendary voice teacher Samuel Margolis at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Davi’s musical interests gravitated naturally to American classics as well, to the standards, jazz and specifically the music that Sinatra had positively reinvented.

“As a kid, I was in my basement listening to [Enrico] Caruso and Sinatra,” Davi said. “Those are the two great voices of all time. I took the journey Sinatra took. He studied with a singer at the Met who was his teacher for years. He did workshops with [opera singer] Robert Merrill. Sinatra was the first singer to take the bel canto technique and put it into pop music. That’s why the legato singing he did, the intonation is in there. That’s why he had a big, high register, whereas, for example, Bing Crosby would thin it out at the high register when he sang.”

“The Great American Songbook is the Shakespeare of America,” the 60-year-old Davi continued. “When I look at Irving Berlin, or Harold Arlen, the Gershwins, Cy Coleman — these guys were kids of Jewish immigrants for the most part, who wrote these great American songs. They were influenced by black jazz and jump blues, pop. All of it just combined into this unique American song style. The music was uplifting; it took us through two world wars, a Depression. It brought us together.”

Singer-pianist Michael Feinstein, in a league of his own when it comes to the Great American Songbook (and celebrating all things Sinatra), released “The Sinatra Project, Volume II: The Good Life” in October. The album features a few songs Sinatra did not record (“C’est Comme Ca” and “Thirteen Women”) and 11 more Ol’ Blue Eyes made his own later in his career. (The first “Sinatra Project” album was released in 2008 and nominated for a Grammy.)

“The music touches me, touches many people so deeply because it’s a combination of these incredible lyrics telling a story and the music guiding it,” Feinstein said. “The incredible harmonic structure to the songs and the beauty of the sounds is extraordinary.”

While Davi set Sinatra on the same plane as Caruso and Crosby early on, Feinstein’s admiration for Sinatra was more gradual.

“I didn’t fully come to appreciate Sinatra until later,” Feinstein said. “I was listening to Bing Crosby when he was still into a very creative jazz sensibility, before he became that homogenized voice of the 1940s. I was listening to Fats Waller and Fred Astaire. When I would listen to Sinatra I would hear interpolations he would do lyrically and an arrogance of attitude that was off-putting to me. Then I finally came to appreciate how he reinvented the pop music sound with Nelson Riddle. They took 20-year-old songs and made them new. I started listening to how Sinatra interpreted a lyric and his ability to swing with a band and make that lyric fresh.”

With his “Sinatra Project” albums, Feinstein said he wants to pay tribute to that reinvention, “how he gave pop music a swing and a swagger, the new depth he found in the meaning of the songs.”

For Davi, who starred in his first film, “Contract on Cherry Street,” in 1977 opposite Sinatra, the album is like coming full circle.

“Here I was, this Italian-American kid in a film with his idol,” Davi said, “I still can’t put into words what that felt like. I was in this small social club in Little Italy at around 2 in the morning, and I’m off to the side just taking it all in because over by the bar are the film’s stars: Harry Guardino, Marty Balsam and Sinatra. And Sinatra calls me over and says, ‘Have a drink.’ And I said, ‘I don’t drink.’ And he says, ‘You’re fired.’” So I went over and had my first Jack Daniels. And here I am [all these years later] making my album debut with his music.”