Fitzgerald's Voice, Riddle's Arrangements Create a Record for the Ages

The creators of Laugh-In used to say that their comedy routines were “arranged by Nelson Riddle.” His name has become synonymous with jazz-pop fusion—he was a man with a remarkable ear for the melodic pop within jazz standards, which made his music accessible to the American public and successfully brought jazz to the “Top Forty.” Indeed, this great arranger’s influence as a man who gave new breadth to performers as diverse as Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Linda Ronstadt continues to be cited as one of the greatest of all time. His hits, including “Route 66” and the Sinatra arrangement of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” have made their way into both the pop and jazz songbook. Riddle’s body of work is overwhelmingly large, but he was one of the first “cross-over” arrangers, and by far the most well-known.

Riddle’s crowning achievement, though, continues to be Fitzgerald’s Gershwin Songbook. The album, recorded in 1959, when both Fitzgerald and Riddle were at their peak, is still considered the ultimate collection of the great American composer’s music. With a full orchestra behind her, Fitzgerald’s voice never sounded better. The arrangements swing the poppiness of songs such as “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” and give Fitzgerald a sultry horn backing on the standard “Our Love is Here to Stay.” Sometimes the songs are delivered with a disarming seriousness—when Fitzgerald breathily intones on “How Long Has this Been Going On?” “Kiss me once, / then once more, / that makes twice, / let’s make it four,” the song nearly falls apart due to her showy earnestness, but with a swell of the orchestra, Riddle brings the song back to a tragic-comic lament of unequalled proportion.

When Fitzgerald laughs, though, the orchestra laughs with her. On “Fascinating Rhythm,” she hits the lowest note of the piece with an intense vibrato as the orchestra backs up to give her space. Riddle draws her voice out gently, not allowing the clarity of tone to break, which provides license for her to sound as intense and over-the-top as she wants. As strings swell behind Fitzgerald and her voice rises and falls, her tone is perfect and light, and she stylizes the pieces with a jazzy and sexy style all her own—cultivated by Riddle, but perfected through sheer talent. The result is two masters working hand-in-hand to create a piece of American art so perfect that it is listenable for all four discs.

While Fitzgerald’s other composer songbooks are great in their own right, (the Rodgers and Hart Songbook, for example, includes Fitzgerald’s classic, seven-minute version of “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”) Riddle and Fitzgerald hit their stride with the Gershwins, and it shows. In the words of Ira Gershwin, the album “’s wonderful, ‘s marvelous,” and continues to hold a place in American lexicons and collections.