Axel Stordahl

Composer/arranger/conductor Axel Stordahl is best known as Frank Sinatra's musical director during the first decade of the singer's solo career, and is often credited with helping to bring pop arranging into the modern age. A native of Staten Island, NY, he was born Odd Stordahl to parents of Norwegian descent on August 8, 1913. He took up the trumpet as a youth, and played in several dance bands around Long Island and the Catskills during the late '20s and early '30s. He also began arranging around this time, and in 1933 he joined Bert Bloch's orchestra in both capacities. Over the next couple of years, Stordahl sang on the side in a vocal trio dubbed the Three Esquires with bandmates Jack Leonard and Joe Bauer. Around 1935 or 1936, Tommy Dorsey hired all three men, and Stordahl joined as third trumpet player and part-time arranger. It soon became apparent that arranging was far and away his greatest strength, and he made it his full-time vocation, becoming Dorsey's lead arranger in short order. Stordahl wrote mostly dance arrangements for the next few years, but when a young singer named Frank Sinatra took Jack Leonard's place, Stordahl found an even more effective niche working on romantic ballads for the emerging heartthrob. Stordahl's lovely, sensitive treatments worked marvelously with Sinatra's supple, yearning voice, and when the singer cut his first four-song solo session in 1942, he hired Stordahl as the arranger and conductor. Sinatra left the Dorsey band for a full-fledged solo career later that year, signing with Columbia and bringing Stordahl with him to serve as musical director. Sinatra took the music world by storm over the next few years, projecting a warm, vulnerable intimacy that was unprecedented in American popular music. Stordahl was an unsung...