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. Such an artistic force is deserving of a first-class full-length biography. Riddle’s innovative work defined the predominant postwar style of arranging, which may be the defining sound of the American century. 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. 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. 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. 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. Few arrangers write their own songs, just as it is extremely unusual for songwriters to make their own arrangements, or even to approve an arrangement by someone else: Both are specialists, and the skill sets involved are very different. What do arrangers do? When working with pop singers, they take songs originally written and published for voice and piano and turn their piano parts into full-blown orchestral scores, adding instrumental introductions, new underscoring, and (sometimes) interludes of their own devising, all of which may or may not be derived from the original song’s melody and harmonies. Ronstadt’s albums sold 7 million copies and introduced him to a new generation of listeners. Riddle, who had been shunted into semi-obscurity by the rise of rock, found himself suddenly famous. In 1983, he recorded the first of three albums on which Linda Ronstadt sang standards backed by his arrangements, and he received credit on the album covers for his participation.
Nelson Riddle, who was born 100 years ago, is the only one of the song arrangers of the postwar era who is still widely known by name-and that is because of a fluke.
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