Nelson Riddle

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Nelson Smock Riddle Jr. (June 1, 1921 – October 6, 1985) was an American arranger, composer, bandleader, and orchestrator whose career spanned the 1980s to the mid-1980s.

Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Judy Garland, Dean Martin, Peggy Lee, Rosemary Clooney, and Keely Smith household names were among the names on Capitol Records.

With a trio of Platinum albums with Linda Ronstadt, he found commercial and critical success in the 1980s.

His orchestras have been nominated for an Academy Award and three Grammy Awards.

Early years

Riddle was born in Oradell, New Jersey, the only child of Marie Albertine Riddle and Nelson Smock Riddle's, and later moved to nearby Ridgewood. He began taking piano lessons at age eight and trombone lessons at age 14. He was encouraged to continue his musical pursuits at Ridgewood High School.

: 17–19

Serge Koussevitsky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra performed Maurice Ravel's Boléro, a formative experience. "...... Those words will come later," Riddle said later. I've never forgot it. It's almost as if the orchestra stole from the stage and smacked you in the chest." (22 )

Riddle had aspired to be a professional singer by his teenage years; "... I wanted to be a jazz trombone player, but I didn't have the resources to do so. 22-23 So began his journey to composing and arranging.

In Rumson, New Jersey, the Riddle family had a summer house. Riddle loved Rumson so much that he begged his parents to allow him to attend his senior year in high school (1938).

Bill Finegan, who began teaching in Rumson, was one of the most influential influences on his later arranging style. Finegan, despite being only four years older than Riddle, was far more musically sophisticated, with 25 of them creating not only some of the most popular swing styles from the 1970s, but also great jazz arrangements such as Tommy Dorsey's "Chloe" and "At Sundown" from the mid-1940s.

Riddle spent his late teens and early 20s playing trombone in and occasionally arranging for various local dance bands, culminating in his appearance with the Charlie Spivak Orchestra. Riddle joined the Merchant Marine in 1943, spent two years with Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, New York, before returning to work for the Charlie Spivak Orchestra.

Riddle investigated orchestration under the guidance of his fellow merchant mariner, composer Alan Shulman. Riddle enlisted in Chicago and joined Tommy Dorsey's orchestra in 1944, where he served as the orchestra's third trombone until being drafted by the Army in April 1945, shortly before World War II came to an end. He was dismissed in June 1946 after fifteen months of active service. He moved to Hollywood shortly thereafter to work as an arranger, and spent the next two years developing scripts for various radio and record projects. 69 Doris Day had a second hit on May 29, 1949, "Again," backed by Riddle.

Personal life

While serving in the Army, Riddle married Dominien Moran in 1945. The couple had six children. In the 1960s, Riddle had an extra-marital affair with singer Rosemary Clooney, which caused the breakdown of their respective marriages. Riddle divorced his wife Doreen in 1968; their separation became legal in 1970. Naomi Tenenholtz, his secretary, and his secretary, with whom he would stay for the remainder of his life, a few months later. Nelson Jr., a London, England, and British actress Paula Wilcox's children are dispersed between the east and west coasts of the United States, with Riddle's children dispersed between the east and west coasts of the country. Rosemary, Riddle's eldest daughter, is the trustee of the Nelson Riddle Trust.

Riddle was a member of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, the national fraternity for males in music.

Riddle cited Stan Kenton's "23 Degrees North, 82 Degrees West" arranged by Bill Russo as the inspiration for his signature trombone interplay crescendos in a 1982 radio interview with Jonathan Schwartz.

Riddle died in Los Angeles, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, at the age of 64, caused by cirrhosis, which had not been present in five years. In the Hall of David Mausoleum in Hollywood, California, his cremated remains are inurned.

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Career revival

In the spring of 1982, Riddle was approached by Linda Ronstadt — via telephone through her manager and producer, Peter Asher — to write arrangements for an album of jazz standards that Ronstadt had been contemplating since her stint in The Pirates of Penzance. The agreement between the two resulted in a three-album contract which included what were to be the last arrangements of Riddle's career, with the exception of an album of twelve Great American Songbook standards he arranged and conducted for his old friend, opera singer Kiri Te Kanawa, in April 1985, six months before his death that October. Ronstadt recalls that when she initially approached Riddle, she did not know if he was even familiar with her music. He knew her name, but basically hated rock 'n' roll. However, his daughter was a big Linda Ronstadt fan and told her father, "Don't worry, Dad. Her checks won't bounce."

When Riddle learned of Ronstadt's desire to learn more about traditional pop music and agreed to record with her, he insisted on a complete album or nothing. He explained to Ronstadt that he had once turned down Paul McCartney, who had sought him out to write an arrangement for one of McCartney's albums, "I just couldn't do it. You can't put something like that in the middle of a bunch of other things. The mood comes and then it changes. It's like putting a picture in a bad frame." Riddle was at first skeptical of Ronstadt's proposed project, but once he agreed, his career turned around immediately. For her to do "elevator music", as she called it, was a great surprise to the young audience. Joe Smith, the president of Elektra, was terrified that the albums would turn off the rock audience. The three albums together sold over seven million copies and brought Riddle back to a young audience during the last three years of his life. Arrangements for Linda Ronstadt's What's New (1983) and Lush Life (1984) won Riddle his second and third Grammy Awards.

On January 19, 1985, Riddle conducted at the nationally televised 50th Presidential Inaugural Gala, the day before the second inauguration of Ronald Reagan. The program was hosted by Frank Sinatra, who sang "Fly Me to the Moon" and "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)" (backed by a solo dance routine by Mikhail Baryshnikov).

Working with Ronstadt, Riddle brought his career back into focus in the last three years of his life. Stephen Holden of The New York Times wrote, What's New "isn't the first album by a rock singer to pay tribute to the golden age of pop, but is ... the best and most serious attempt to rehabilitate an idea of pop that Beatlemania and the mass marketing of rock LPs for teen-agers undid in the mid-60s ... In the decade prior to Beatlemania, most of the great band singers and crooners of the 40s and 50s codified a half-century of American pop standards on dozens of albums ... many of them now long out-of-print." What's New is the first album by a rock singer to have major commercial success in rehabilitating the Great American Songbook.

Riddle's third and final Grammy was awarded posthumously—and accepted on his behalf by Linda Ronstadt just prior to airtime—in early 1986. Ronstadt subsequently presented the evening's first on-air award, at which time she narrated a tribute to the departed maestro.

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