Two excerpts from "The Man Who (Re)made Sinatra: The Riddle of Nelson" by Terry Techout in Commentary (July / Augusty 2021
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Nelson Riddle was, perhaps, the greatest of all the arrangers who worked on the Great American Songbook, primarily because of the work he did in the 1950s with Frank Sinatra. The two men were brought together by Capitol Records in 1953 in the hope of updating Sinatra’s singing style, which still recalled his youthful crooning of sentimental ballads. Within a matter of years, Sinatra had recorded his two finest albums, Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! (1956) and Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely (1958), on which he emerged decisively as a mature artist, in part because of Riddle’s sympathetic backing. Riddle also wrote arrangements of like quality for Rosemary Clooney, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Antônio Carlos Jobim, Peggy Lee, and Dean Martin. Riddle’s innovative work defined the predominant postwar style of arranging, which may be the defining sound of the American century. Such an artistic force is deserving of a first-class full-length biography. Alas, Peter Levinson’s September in the Rain (2001), though full of illuminating detail about his life, is musically uninformed, while Geoffrey Littlefield’s newly published Nelson Riddle: Music with a Heartbeat, nominally co-written with Riddle’s son Christopher, is a vanity-press disaster, besmirched by factual errors and even more musically ignorant than Levinson’s book. Still, September in the Rain does let us see how Riddle developed as an artist, in the process enriching our understanding of the life of the chronically melancholy man and his uncomfortable relationship with the greatest popular singer of the 20th century.
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Today, Riddle’s style, especially as documented in the albums he recorded with Sinatra, is universally acknowledged as the high-water mark of postwar vocal arranging. Their making was a nerve-racking process for Riddle, who confessed to finding Sinatra terrifyingly mercurial: “Frank contributed a lot to the orchestral part of his own records, just by leveling a hostile stare at the musicians, with those magnetic blue eyes! The point of this action was to make me, or any other conductor, feel at that exact moment as if he had two left feet, three ears, and one eye.”
But the resulting tension, he admitted, was “a positive factor that found its way into the record,” and it brought out the best in Riddle. More than a half-century later, their albums sound as vital as ever—and his ability to overcome his fear of Sinatra and rise to the occasion is a large part of what has kept them so. >>>
For the entire article, click here. For the record, many Frankophiles consider "In the Wee Small Hoirs" an even better album of ballads than the great "Only the Lonely." Teachout is absolutely correct when he says that song arrangers are underpaid, underappreciated, and sometimes unacknowledged. Other Sinatra arrangers worth more than a mention include Billy May, George Siravo, Gordon Jenkins, Don Costa, Axel Stordahl, Quincy Jones, Neil Hefti, and Johnny Mandel.
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