walking upstream…
José José
sourcesSelecciones — "Todo quedó en el ayer · Univision — "'Mi alma está en español' · josejose.us official/fan biography (career narration; radio influences of Sinatra and Mathis) · AllMusic — 20 Triunfadoras de José José tracklist (confirms "New York, New York" recording) · Wikipedia — José José (biographical overview)
On March 25, 1970, at the Teatro Ferrocarrilero in Mexico City, twenty-two-year-old José Rómulo Sosa Ortiz sang "El Triste" at a national song festival — and the judges placed him third. The crowd would not accept it; that night, in the audience's ears, he had already won. Born in 1948 to an opera-singing father and a concert-pianist mother, he'd spent his teens giving serenatas for cash and working a lithography shop floor before recording under a doubled stage name chosen to honor his recently deceased father. Alcoholism nearly ended his career twice, and a collapsed diaphragm from pneumonia once threatened his voice outright; he got sober at a Minnesota treatment center in 1993 and rebuilt from there. By his death in 2019, "El Príncipe de la Canción" had spent five decades teaching Latin American pop that a ballad could be sung like a confession.
the sound in question
1970
El TristeJosé José
walk the tributaries ↓
Armando Manzanero1960s–1970s · Bolero / Latin ballad
"Mi maestro Manzanero me ayudó a entrar a RCA Víctor," José José told the magazine Selecciones in 2006 — my teacher Manzanero got me into RCA Victor — crediting the composer who produced his 1969 debut LP and wrote two of its songs. Asked decades later, unprompted, to name his own favorite recordings, he singled out one of them by name: "Pero te extraño, de Armando Manzanero." Of every singer and songwriter he named across that interview, Manzanero is the only one he called "maestro."
listen: upstream & here
1969
Pero Te ExtrañoArmando Manzanero
1969
Pero Te ExtrañoJosé José
listen forManzanero's own recording of "Pero Te Extraño" stays close and unhurried — piano, a murmur of strings, his voice barely above a speaking register. On José José's 1969 debut version, the same minor-key melody gets a young tenor's fuller sound and a harder swell under the title line, but the confiding, direct-address lyric and unhurried chord movement are pure Manzanero — the songwriting mold the singer's own style would later break out of.
Frank Sinatra1950s · Traditional pop / Vocal jazz
In 1973, José José recorded for RCA Víctor while, unknown to him, his singles were already turning up as ambient music inside Frank Sinatra's own Reprise Records studios in Los Angeles. Sinatra tried to sign him; RCA blocked the deal, and José José spent weeks afterward drinking, playing Sinatra's records on repeat. Four years later Sinatra slipped into a Tijuana nightclub to watch him sing, left without a word, and passed a message to the club owner instead: "Dice que si sigues cantando así, te vas a lastimar, que tienes que vocalizar" — that if he kept singing like that, he'd hurt himself; he needed to vocalize.
listen: upstream & heresource: Quién — "El dueto frustrado de José José con Frank Sinatra que lo llevó al alcoholismo" (Sinatra relationship, drawing on his memoir Esta Es Mi Vida) ↗
1980
Theme from New York, New YorkFrank Sinatra
1982
New York, New YorkJosé José
listen forSinatra's 1980 "Theme from New York, New York" opens on a brass fanfare and rides big-band swagger into a victory lap. José José's own Spanish-language "New York, New York," recorded as a direct tribute and issued on his 1982 compilation, keeps that same brassy architecture — but listen to how he drags his vowels behind the beat exactly as Sinatra does, holding a phrase back before letting it land, then pushing the final note past where the arrangement expects him to stop.
Johnny Mathis1950s–1960s · Traditional pop / Vocal jazz
As a teenager working nights in a Mexico City print shop, José José kept a radio on for company; among the voices he returned to, his official biography records, were Frank Sinatra and Johnny Mathis. Decades later, the journalist María Antonieta Collins put a name to what she heard in his phrasing: "Siguió los pasos de Johnny Mathis y Tony Bennett" — he followed in the footsteps of Johnny Mathis and Tony Bennett — the lush, close-mic romantic delivery that made Mathis a hitmaker in the U.S. a decade before José José broke through in Mexico.
listen: upstream & here
1957
Chances AreJohnny Mathis
1970
El TristeJosé José
listen forMathis's 1957 "Chances Are" floats his high, room-filling tenor over a string bed so smooth it barely seems to move; he never pushes, letting the melody's own leaps supply the drama. José José's 1970 breakthrough "El Triste" opens the same way, voice alone over a hushed arrangement, before climbing to a far harder, more anguished finish than Mathis ever allowed himself. No single recording ties the two songs together — the connection here is a shared vocal instrument, not a documented cover, and the honest reading is a family resemblance rather than a direct line.