Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [269]
It sure didn’t sound like Billy to Frank. It didn’t sound like anybody. He loved it.
They did a take, and then another, got it just right. It was golden—but it wasn’t Billy May. “Who wrote that arrangement?” Frank asked Alan Dell.
“This guy,” Dell said, indicating Mr. Serious, who was distractedly leafing through pages of sheet music. “Nelson Riddle.”
The name registered for the first time. Sinatra made a surprised face. “Beautiful,” he said.
It was a serious compliment. Frank was generous with gifts and money but extremely stingy when it came to praise. If he said it, he meant it; if he didn’t mean it, he didn’t say anything.
He looked at Riddle and said it again. “Beautiful.” And Mr. Serious managed a quick, almost undetectable smile: more like a wince, really.
Nelson Smock Riddle (the unfortunate middle name was Dutch) may have been the most important man in Frank Sinatra’s life whom Sinatra never even tried to befriend. Unlike so many men in the popular-music business, the arranger never pretended to be a hail-fellow-well-met; rather, he was intimacy averse, a dour, caustic, buttoned-up Lutheran who happened—like the man he was meeting for the first time that Thursday evening in April 1953—to be a musical genius.
Like Sinatra, Nelson Riddle was a New Jersey–born only child of a domineering mother and a weak father, a man with powerful sexual urges and a fondness for alcohol. Like Sinatra, he was awash in conflicts; unlike Sinatra, Riddle buried his conflicts rather than acting them out. He was a solitary drinker, and he either sublimated his obsessions with women into his work or hid them in clandestine affairs. Although he would become moderately famous, his introverted nature and his preference for the more intellectual art of arranging over composition threw him into the shade. Later Riddle would feel desperate envy for the fame and wealth of such big-name show-offs as Henry Mancini and André Previn, men who could compose and arrange and smile for the television cameras. He would chew himself up inside as he created masterpieces for others.
He was a middling professional trombone player, skillful enough to play for the Charlie Spivak and Tommy Dorsey big bands at a young age (he joined Dorsey at twenty-three, in 1944, and held the third chair in the trombone section), but more valued for his skills as an arranger. When Nelson Riddle set pencil to paper, magic happened.
It is extraordinarily difficult, in the post–rock ’n’ roll, post-singer-songwriter, digitized world of modern popular music, to convey just how important a figure the arranger used to be. Of course orchestration was always essential to classical music, but in the early twentieth century jazz and jazz-based popular music began in improvisation. Yet as the Jazz Age turned into the Swing Era, as the bands got bigger and the dance numbers got more elaborate, arrangements became ever more essential. And writing the tempi and harmonies and counterpoints in such a way as to match—or even deepen—the heart-quickening rush of improvised jazz was an art few men could master. Many of the early white big bands—like Paul Whiteman’s—were tootling, anodyne versions of more dynamic and artistically complex black organizations such as Duke Ellington’s and Jimmie Lunceford’s. This had less to do with the players—there was no shortage of great white instrumentalists—than with the men who were writing the charts. Tommy Dorsey’s band got a rocket boost in 1939 when Dorsey stole Lunceford’s great arranger Sy Oliver. And Oliver was still writing for Dorsey when Nelson Riddle joined Dorsey’s band five years later.
Riddle had great ears—classically trained ears—and he paid close attention. According to Peter J. Levinson,