Frank: The Voice (98 page)
Authors: James Kaplan
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #General, #United States, #Biography, #Composers & Musicians, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #Singers, #Singers - United States, #Sinatra; Frank
From the moment the nervous-faced guy on the podium signaled the downbeat, Frank knew something was up. Stoller clashed a pair of cymbals; the horns swirled a downward-spiraling cadenza; and then the second Frank sang, “got the string around my finger,” the brass
kicked—
BANG!—and the band was cooking. Frank was smiling as he sang, as the seventeen musicians swung along behind him—he even had a smile for the unsmiling guy on the stand, who was waving his arms for all he was worth.
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, “
He couldn’t help but notice the inherent charm in Oliver’s writing—his strong sense of the beat, the basic swinging effects, staccato phrases with an element of humor; a brilliant sense of continuity and climax—which was combined with his superlative use of dynamics. (As Oliver once told Dorsey’s close friend Eddie Collins, ‘Dynamics, that’s the secret.’)”
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, his eyes wide and blazing. “I’m back! I’m back, baby, I’m back!”
Frank and Ava in Italy, May 1953. He knew he was back, but the world would take a while to find out. His European tour went from bad to worse.
(photo credit 35.1)
Y
et the rest of 1953 was to be a period of hard work and only momentary triumphs, of dazzling new artistic landscapes glimpsed teasingly, then fogged in. The day after Frank recorded “I’ve Got the World on a String,” he had another session at Capitol, with the same players as the day before, a tight jazz ensemble—reeds, brass, rhythm, no strings. Riddle was once again on the podium. This time it was his session, with his arrangements exclusively, and it went terribly wrong on the first run-through. The first number was Koehler, Barris,
and Moll’s “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams.” “
Sinatra was at his lead sheet—I don’t think we’d even made a take yet,” the trombonist Milt Bernhart recalled.
He was running the song over, and suddenly stopped—cold. And the band stopped. Frank said, “Give them a break.” He crooked his finger at Nelson, and they walked out of the studio. I recognized that the arrangement hadn’t gone over at all. Most of the guys began to play poker; I don’t know why, but I followed [Sinatra and Riddle], and watched them in the smaller studio, from the hallway.
Bernhart could see the singer and the arranger behind the soundproof glass, but couldn’t hear what they were saying. “
Nelson was standing frozen, and Frank was doing all the talking,” Bernhart said.
His hands were moving, but he was not angry … he seemed to be telling [Riddle] something of great importance. He was gesticulating, his hands going up and down and sideways. He was describing music, and singing! When we came back, the date was over. And I was positive that I knew what Frank was telling him—it was about the arrangement! I could tell it was very busy. Too busy. There was no room for the singer. If they had taken away the singer, it would have made a great instrumental … At that point, Nelson had a lot of technique as an arranger, but he had to be told to take it easy when writing for a singer. And he was told! Frank was giving him a lesson: a lesson in writing for a singer. A lesson in writing for Frank Sinatra …
Sinatra could have dumped him. Other singers would have said, “Well, get another guy,” if they were as important as Frank Sinatra. But he didn’t. Which means that he recognized something in Nelson that a lot of people wouldn’t.
Namely, that Nelson was brilliant, and he was trying too hard. He had already passed the audition. Sinatra addressed him as one craftsman to another, and with a note of gentle respect. Frank chose four new numbers, Riddle worked feverishly through the night, then they reconvened the next day, this time with a full orchestra and strings, for a rare Saturday session.
Frank and Nelson shelved “Dreams” and tried four ballads: “Anytime, Anywhere,” “My One and Only Love,” “I Can Read Between the Lines,” and, of all things, the theme to
From Here to Eternity
, onto which lyrics had hastily been slapped to capitalize on the film’s summer release. Sinatra was in wonderful, mature voice that Saturday, but the material was mainly unremarkable, with the mixed exception of Robert Mellin and Guy Wood’s “My One and Only Love.” It’s a beautiful melody, but Frank can’t quite find his way into the stilted lyric—and to make a song great, he always needed to live inside the words. (Oddly enough, two versions of the tune that have held up better are the glorious Johnny Hartman–John Coltrane collaboration and Chet Baker’s cracked and whispery rendition: in each of these cases, however, the singer is more instrument than interpreter.)
What’s most notable about the four tracks Sinatra and Riddle laid down is that they
worked
. The recordings weren’t ecstatic, but the strings supported Sinatra’s voice warmly and solidly—and never (as Stordahl’s strings always threatened) soporifically. At times Riddle’s fiddles lilted ever so slyly, giving promise of glories to come. The session was a noble effort and a good place holder. Nelson had labored heroically to make it simple and beautiful, but for the time being, simple and pretty would have to do.
