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Nelson Smock Riddle, Jr. (June 1, 1921 October 6, 1985) was an American arranger, composer, bandleader and orchestrator whose career stretched from the late 1940s to the mid-1980s. His work for Capitol Records kept such vocalists as Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Judy Garland, Dean Martin, Peggy Lee, Johnny Mathis, Rosemary Clooney and Keely Smith household names. He found commercial and critical success again in the 1980s with a trio of Platinum albums with Linda Ronstadt. ==Early years== Riddle was born in Oradell, New Jersey, the only child of Marie Albertine Riddle and Nelson Smock Riddle, Sr., and later moved to nearby Ridgewood. Following his father's interest in music, he began taking piano lessons at age eight and trombone lessons at age fourteen. A formative experience was hearing Serge Koussevitsky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra playing Ravel's Boléro. Riddle said later: "...I've never forgotten it. It's almost as if the orchestra leaped from the stage and smacked you in the face..."〔 By his teenage years he had decided to become a professional musician; "...I wanted to be a jazz trombone player, but I didn't have the coordination."〔 So his inclinations began to turn to writing—composing and arranging. Riddle and his family had a summer house in Rumson, New Jersey. He enjoyed Rumson so much that he convinced his parents to allow him to attend high school there for his senior year (1938). In Rumson while playing for trumpeter Charlie Briggs' band, the Briggadiers, he met one of the most important influences on his later arranging style: Bill Finegan, with whom he began arranging lessons. Despite being only four years older than Nelson, Finegan was considerably more musically sophisticated than Riddle,〔 within a few years creating not only some of the most popular arrangements from the swing era, such as Glenn Miller's "Little Brown Jug" but also great jazz arrangements such as Tommy Dorsey's "Chloe" and "At Sundown" from the mid-1940s. After his graduation from Rumson High School, he spent his late teens and early 20s playing trombone in and occasionally arranging for various local dance bands, culminating in his association with the Charlie Spivak Orchestra. In 1943, Riddle joined the Merchant Marine, serving at Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, New York for about two years while continuing to work for the Charlie Spivak Orchestra. He studied orchestration under his fellow merchant mariner, composer Alan Shulman. After his enlistment term ended, Riddle traveled to Chicago to join Tommy Dorsey's orchestra in 1944, where he remained the orchestra's third trombone for eleven months until drafted by the Army in April 1945, shortly before the end of World War II. He was discharged in June 1946, after fifteen months of active duty. He moved shortly thereafter to Hollywood to pursue his career as an arranger and spent the next several years writing arrangements for multiple radio and record projects. 〔 In May 1949, Doris Day had a #2 hit, "Again," backed by Riddle. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Nelson Riddle」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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