Frank Shiner

Frank Shiner emerged as an interpretive singer whose jazz-inflected phrasing and warmly intense phrasing finally reached listeners after he stepped away from performing for twenty years. Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, he spent his childhood in the neighboring community of Mountain Top, where his father ran a bakery and put him to work there at age ten. The elder Shiner often sang old country numbers around the house, yet young Frank showed little interest in taking the stage himself until he played Henry Higgins in a high-school staging of My Fair Lady. That experience awakened an acting ambition, prompting him to switch from pre-law studies at Wilkes-Barre’s Kings College to Theater Arts; after graduation he moved to New York City in 1982. Later the same year he met Suzanne, whom he married in 1984. Steady work followed in theater and on television, supplemented by jobs tending bar and selling goods, until the birth of their first child in 1988 tightened finances and led him to leave the entertainment field, launch his own business, and settle the family in Westchester, New York. A serious health scare struck when Suzanne received a diagnosis of aggressive breast cancer, requiring four years of treatment. In 2010 the couple attended a restaurant jazz open-mike evening; at Suzanne’s urging Shiner reluctantly performed three numbers with the house band, after which the leader invited him to appear regularly. With his wife’s encouragement he accepted, and audiences soon responded to his heartfelt delivery. His first album, The Real Me, appeared in 2014 under the guidance of producer Gary Katz, whose credits include Steely Dan. The release positioned Shiner as a mature yet energetic new voice. Three years later he issued the blue-eyed soul collection Lonely Town, Lonely Street on his own Bakerson Records imprint.