THE HEARTBEAT BEHIND SINATRA’S SONGS

“I’ve kept a low profile,” arranger-conductor Nelson Riddle remarked two years ago as he looked back on a career that had spanned some 43 years. “I didn’t mean to do it that way. That’s just the way it turned out.”

While Riddle’s death at age 64 last Sunday received wide press coverage, his personality and work remained subordinate to the many great singers, ranging from Frank Sinatra in the ‘50s to Linda Ronstadt in the ‘80s, whom he accompanied. His arrangements were often brash, but the man wasn’t.

“Nelson was by nature a man who was laid-back, modest and reluctant to push himself into the forefront,” veteran record producer Norman Granz recalled last week. “Yet his music didn’t reflect that. What it did reflect was a kind of measured confidence, particularly in accompaniment. His sense of humor was very droll, and I think some of that can be heard as well.”

Besides recordings, Riddle’s work included film scores (“Lolita,” “The Great Gatsby”), television themes (“The Untouchables,” “Route 66”) and concerts (he conducted for Ella Fitzgerald just last month at the Hollywood Bowl). But it was as arranger for such artists as Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Dinah Shore, Nat King Cole and especially Sinatra that Riddle left his greatest mark.

“Frank undoubtedly brought out my best work,” Riddle once told author Robin Douglas-Home. “In working out arrangements with Frank, I suppose I stuck to two main rules. First, find the peak of the song and build the whole arrangement to that peak, pacing it as he paces himself vocally.

“Second, when he’s moving, get the hell out of the way. When he’s doing nothing, move in fast and establish something. After all, what arranger in his right mind would try to fight against Sinatra’s voice?”

Riddle’s innate sensitivity for orchestration--from swinging big-band writing to luscious string work--was near-unimpeachable.

“Nelson is the greatest arranger in the world,” Sinatra once said. “There’s a great depth somehow to the music he creates.”

The best Sinatra-Riddle tracks were crafted in what the arranger called “the tempo of the heartbeat. That’s the tempo that strikes people easiest because, without their knowing it, they are moving to that pace all their waking hours.

“Music to me is sex--it’s all tied up somehow, and the rhythm of sex is the heartbeat,” he explained. “ I always have some woman in mind for each song I arrange; it could be a reminiscence of some past romantic experience, or just a dream-scene I build in my own imagination.”

Said Granz, who hired Riddle to arrange the five-volume “George and Ira Gershwin Songbook” for Ella Fitzgerald: “Of the top arrangers of his time--Gordon Jenkins, Billy May, Russ Garcia--I think Nelson was the most serious. A lot of them would come in with the copyists literally trailing behind them, doing a page at a time because the arranger had waited till the last minute. Not with Nelson; everything under him was always laid out, yet you never felt locked in. You were always free.”

With the surprise success in 1983 of Ronstadt’s “What’s New” album--a collection of standards sumptuously arranged by Riddle--he was again in the public eye and clearly enjoying himself.

Other successes lay ahead: a 1984 Grammy (his second) for the album, a critically acclaimed series of concerts with Ronstadt, and the inevitable sequel to “What’s New,” “Lush Life.”

Perhaps Riddle felt his own contributions had not received their due, or that his own low-key personality was a career disadvantage. “I’m tired of this low profile,” he said in ’83.

He needn’t have worried.

“It’s funny,” Granz recalled. “My own jazz people used to speculate on how people who played certain instruments often reflected their instruments. Drummers were always the most aggressive, and trombonists were the most taciturn. Nelson, of course, was a trombone player, and I think his personality reflected the sonorous solemnity of that instrument. But take the trombones out of the band and you miss something. The same with Nelson.”