THE LAST TIME we saw Frank Sinatra, he stood there in a three-piece suit in the numb July air of the Merriweather Post Pavilion stage in Columbia, trying to navigate a lyric with a note that had wandered astray.

Sometimes it was like that in his last years. The soaring voice that unleashed adolescent passions half a century earlier would bend and lose its way, and Sinatra would strain to snatch it back on the far side of a fading lyric.

When he did "My Heart Stood Still," he missed the last note so badly that he went back and tried it again, muscling his way through sheer willpower and hoping the ancient pipes would hold out. The voice was weary from too much use, and maybe from trying to carry an entire culture past its allotted time. He was an old man, and the sweltering air was enough to wilt anyone.

"Take your coat off, Frankie," a guy in the audience bellowed that night. "Take your coat off," Sinatra hollered back. "I'm not complaining."

So you forgave the strained notes, and the syllables bitten off too early, because this was a performer holding on to fading elegance, and it was a man with a history writ large and raw, and a voice that still articulated pain and longing better than any pop voice of this century.

And it was a last reminder of a vanishing time: when the human voice still counted for more than the modern electronics engulfing it, and the lyrics of a song touched the most vulnerable places of the heart.

And you wondered, when this man goes, where do grown-ups go for music? Where have the great songwriters gone, and where are those musicians who translate their inspiration, and where can we find it if they do?

The questions came back to some of us over the weekend, on rainy Saturday night in the auditorium of Wilde Lake High School in Columbia, where the Baltimore Jazz Orchestra was performing.

They were only marvelous, this 18-piece orchestra reaching back to the music that pre-dated rock 'n' roll: not only Sinatra's best time, but the time of Duke Ellington doing "Take the A Train" and Count Basie's "April in Paris" and George Gershwin's "Summertime."

In the culture of American amnesia, where do grown-ups go to find such music today? The radio airwaves are cluttered with rock 'n' roll, programming to an audience that thinks music didn't exist until the time of Bill Haley. And only a few lonely outposts of more sophisticated sound squeeze out a little broadcast space of their own.

There's WEAA-FM, the Morgan State station, with its wonderful jazz. There's WLG-AM, with its pre-rock pop music and Alan Field's weekly tributes to Broadway. And there's jazz at night on WJHU-FM.

But, across the radio dial, day in and day out, if you look for music you get the constant unwelcome reminder that we live in a strictly rock 'n' roll culture. Sinatra's gone, Ellington's forgotten and you have to bring bloodhounds to search for isolated areas where rock isn't banging through your brain.

Thus, the delight of finding the Baltimore Jazz Orchestra. Formed five years ago by Louis Hecht and Ed Goldstein as the performing arm of the Baltimore Jazz Foundation, and bouncing around the state since then, it has played with Ethel Ennis at the Peabody Institute, Mel Torme at the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall and Etta James at Artscape.

Saturday night in Columbia, it had the charming Ferebee Streett along for vocals. She did Jerome Kern's "Bill." She did Johnny Mercer's "Accentuate the Positive." She did Hoagy Carmichael's "Baltimore Oriole." Does anybody else remember "Baltimore Oriole?" Probably not even Peter Angelos.

It's part of a culture that's getting away from us. It's the music that arrived at the century's beginning through places like Ellis Island and found voice in the children of European immigrants who tied it to the rhythms of black sharecroppers and honky-tonk piano players - and all of it wrapped around a new sound, of downtown traffic and horns honking and 2-o'clock-in-the-morning big-city loneliness.

Yes, it arrived long ago and, yes, pieces of the past inevitably slip away. In America today, we have a collective attention span no longer than a thumb reaching for a television remote control.

But we lose pieces of our heritage in the process. Across the radio dial, does rock 'n' roll have to monopolize all musical outposts? Across the area's clubs and concert stages, can't we find more space for the likes of Ellington and Gershwin and the Baltimore Jazz Orchestra?

On the night Frank Sinatra reached for his final notes from a Columbia stage, everybody knew his time was beginning to run out. But why has a death sentence been imposed on so much of the music he articulated?