Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [270]
Nelson Riddle had all kinds of secrets. While the other players in Dorsey’s band were staying up to all hours, getting pie-eyed, chasing skirts, snoring through the morning, then staggering blearily to the next gig, Riddle was listening to his records of Debussy and Ravel and Delius. He too loved liquor and women and the pounding beat of great jazz. He loved Sy Oliver’s arrangement of Lunceford’s “Stomp It Off”—and he loved Jacques Ibert’s “Ports of Call.” His writing flowered in the territory between.
Riddle spent a year in the Army at the end of the war, then, fatefully, decided against returning to being a cog in Dorsey’s trombone section. He wanted to write. As the big-band era gave way to the age of the singer in the mid-and late 1940s, he found himself in Los Angeles, arranging for anyone who would hire him. Up to the time when he first met Sinatra, Riddle’s strongest suit had been ghostwriting. He was so musically adept—and so naturally self-effacing—that he could arrange in anybody’s style. He also frequently subcontracted: he first connected with Nat “King” Cole when an overtaxed arranger named Les Baxter threw Riddle a couple of tunes to orchestrate for a Cole recording date. One of the songs was 1950’s “Mona Lisa.” It turned into a monster hit.
By late 1951, Riddle had become Nat Cole’s musical director, a job that led to freelance arranging gigs for a wide variety of singers: Billy Eckstine, Kate Smith, and Mel Tormé, among others. Yet, according to Will Friedwald, “Riddle was still considered a newcomer when [Alan] Livingston and [Voyle] Gilmore brought him to the attention of Frank Sinatra in 1953.”
Hence all Alan Dell’s prefatory disclaimers about Billy May at the April 30 session—and hence Riddle’s extreme seriousness. The state of Sinatra’s career didn’t matter a hill of beans to Nelson Riddle: he knew a fellow genius when he heard one. And he wanted very badly to work with Frank Sinatra—as himself. His grave demeanor on the podium hid the fact that he was quaking inside.
He was able to show what he had on the first two numbers, “I’ve Got the World on a String,” then “Don’t Worry ’Bout Me.” Then he waxed chameleonic. “Now we have to make like Billy May,” he announced, in businesslike tones, as he led Frank and the band into “I Love You” and “South of the Border.” The arrangements sounded exactly like May, and the players swung precisely as they would have under his baton. Fifty years later, Ted Nash, a sax player on the session who’d also worked with May, declared, “ ‘South of the Border’—I thought that was Billy’s arrangement—it’s so typically Billy. I can’t picture that Nelson would have done that in Billy’s style—Nelson was so ultra-serious! All Billy’s arrangements were written out for us. Billy was known for his special slides and slurps. There would be special coding on the paper, so the notes to slide on were known. We all knew how he worked and the sounds to aim for.”
Frank recording at Capitol Studio C, West Hollywood, April 1953. (photo credit 34.2)
Riddle had written every slide and slurp. And not only the latter two May-esque cuts, but the first two also, would be released under the label “Frank Sinatra with Billy May and His Orchestra.”
Frank loved Billy May; he would do important work with him in the years to come. But as Sinatra listened to the gloriously exuberant playback of “I’ve Got the World on a String” late that Thursday night, he knew that something very new, and very big, was up, something rich and strange and quite extraordinary. It was as if he had awakened from a long winter into a spring unlike any he had ever imagined. And more: the words of the song had come true at last.
“Jesus Christ,” he breathed, almost prayerfully,