Pianist Bill Miller died on Tuesday. Obituary here by Will Friedwald in the New York Sun.

He was Frank Sinatra’s accompanist just about solidly from the early 1950s till Frank ceased performing, and had worked regularly with Frank Sinatra, Jr. since then. In fact, aged 91, he was on tour with Frank Jr. at the very end. From Friedwald’s obit:

On July 1, he suffered from a broken hip, and then from a heart attack following surgery. “He was sharp as a tack until the moment he died,” as Sinatra Jr. told Variety’s Army Archerd, “When he was being wheeled into the operating room he said, ‘Fly me to the moon.’ This is a very dark hour for us all. We cried together.”"

A couple of days before that, as it happens, the Washington Post had published a really good piece on Frank Jr., (Frank Jr., the Unsung Sinatra) in which Bill Miller was also heavily featured. RWB saw Frank Jr. and his band once, years ago on a July 4th at Battery Park, New York City. I had no particular expectations — it was a free gig — but was thoroughly impressed by his class and his contagious love of the music he and the band were performing.

You can’t mention Frank Sinatra Jr. on a Bob Dylan related web site without referring to one of the real “left-field” moments in Dylan’s memoir Chronicles, when Dylan and his wife go to see Frank Jr. perform at the Rainbow Room. Dylan’s not fond of providing dates, but it sounds like 1970. Why did he go?

No hassles and nobody chasing me, that’s why . . . that and maybe because I felt a connection — I reckoned that we were about near the same age and that he was a contemporary of mine. Anyway, Frank was a fine singer. I didn’t care if he was as good as his old man or not — he sounded fine, and I liked his big blasting band. Afterwards he came by and sat with us at our table. Obviously it had surprised him that someone like me would come see him, but when he saw that I genuinely liked show tunes, he eased up and relaxed, said he liked a few of my songs, “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Don’t Think Twice,” asked me questions about what kind of places I played ( I was retired and lived like a hermit but didn’t say that). He talked about the civil rights movement, said his father had been active in civil rights and had always fought for the underdog — that his father felt like he was one himself. Frank Jr. seemed pretty smart, nothing faked or put-on or ritzy about him. There was a legitimacy about what he did, and he knew who he was. The conversation rolled along.

“How do you think it would make feel,” he said, “to find out that the underdog had turned out to be a son of a bitch?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “probably not so good.”

That’s an interesting way of conveying how what had been the civil rights movement had somehow mutated into something else by that time (another, albeit somewhat longer take on that and other things would be here by James Nuechterlein).

Coming back around to piano player Bill Miller, here’s yet another YouTube clip, of Frank Sinatra (senior) performing Ol’ Man River on a TV special from 1968 (a great performance too). It’s a cinch that he’s being accompanied on piano by Miller, or “Sun-tan Charlie,” as Frank was fond of calling the pale pianist when introducing him to audiences.

(And by the way, here also is Army Archerd’s piece on Bill Miller’s passing.)

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