Frank Sinatra
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Present Future, a highly ambitious triple album that found Sinatra recording songs from the past (pre-rock era) and present (rock era and contemporary) that he had overlooked during his career, while 'The Future' was a free-form suite of new songs linked à la musical theater by a theme, in this case, Sinatra pondering over the future. The album garnered six Grammy nominations — winning for best liner notes — and peaked at number 17 on Billboard's album chart, while spawning yet another song that would become a signature tune, "Theme from New York, New York" as well as Sinatra's much lauded (second) recording of George Harrison's "Something" (The first was not officially released on an album until 1972's Frank Sinatra's Greatest Hits, Vol. 2.) The following year, Sinatra built on the success of Trilogy with She Shot Me
Down, an album that revisited the dark tone of his Capitol years, and was praised by critics as a vintage late-period Sinatra. Sinatra would comment that it was "A complete saloon album... tear-jerkers and cry-in-your-beer kind of things." Sinatra was embroiled in controversy in 1981 when he worked a ten-day engagement for $2 million in Sun City, South Africa breaking the cultural blockade on Apartheid South Africa. See Artists United Against Apartheid Frank Sinatra was selected as one of the five recipients of the 1983 Kennedy Center Honors, alongside Katharine Dunham, James Stewart, Elia Kazan and Virgil Thomson. Quoting Henry James in honoring Sinatra, Reagan said that "art was the shadow of humanity," and said that Sinatra had "spent his life casting a magnificent and powerful shadow." Earlier that year, Sinatra had worked with Quincy Jones for the first time in nearly two decades on the album L.A. Is My Lady, which was well received critically. The album was a substitute for another Jones project, an album of duets with Lena Horne, which had to be abandoned. (Horne developed vocal problems and Sinatra, committed to other engagements, could not wait to record.) In 1990, Sinatra celebrated his 75th birthday with a national tour, and was awarded the second "Ella Award" by the Los
1990s: Duets, final performances