September In The Rain: The Life Of Nelson Riddle

September in the Rain - The Life of Nelson Riddle ** by Nelson Riddle. Book. Hardcover. 320 pages. Watson-Guptill #0823076725. Published by Watson-Guptill.

In this entertaining biography, Levinson highlights Riddles song-writing accomplishments that had singers topping the charts. By 1953, Frank Sinatras record sales had plummeted, his TV show was canceled, and MGM dropped him. But his career took on new life and artistic depth after he recorded a series of albums with Riddle, whose intelligent, seductive arrangements have become American classics. Aside from Sinatra, Riddle worked with Nat King Cole (on almost all of his most famous singles) and Ella Fitzgerald (in her American Songbook collections), as well as with Judy Garland, Rosemary Clooney and Johnny Mathis. He scored such films as the original Oceans 11 * Can-Can * and The Great Gatsby, for which he received an Oscar. Levinson, a longtime friend of Riddle and a respected jazz publicist, meticulously narrates Riddles personal life and charts the importance and enormous breadth of the arrangers career. While the narrative covers salient aspects of Riddles life (his relationship with his cold, autocratic mother, his affair with Rosemary Clooney, the disintegration of his once-happy marriage and an underlying depression throughout his life), Levinsons analysis of his work and the music industry give the book both its vitality and enormous value.