Riddle Chasing the Sixties Sound
Riddle's charts catch up with the early '60s, finally shedding the lush '50s arranging style that made him famous.
By 1962, Nelson Riddle was already established as one of Hollywood's most reliable orchestral arrangers, but Love Is a Game of Poker finds him recalibrating for a new decade. The Mancini effect was real — contemporaries were finding commercial success with more prominent rhythm sections and jazzier textures, and Riddle wasn't about to be left behind. His melodic instinct never faltered, but the arrangements here are leaner and more percussive than his '50s work, with real bite in the horn sections and drums that actually drive the music forward.
What's striking is how unafraid Riddle is to lean into cinema orchestration even on songs that don't strictly need it. On three tracks he wrote the melodies himself, and the cinematic language — sweeping strings that snap back, clean horn punches, rhythm sections that breathe — marks a genuine departure from the approach that had defined his earlier records. He's not abandoning elegance, but he's making it serve a more modern energy.
This isn't Riddle at his most celebrated, and AllMusic's three-star assessment reflects genuine limitations — the record doesn't have the structural invention of his best movie scoring work. But it matters precisely because it shows Riddle actively evolving rather than retreading familiar ground. He was still a working professional moving with the times, even if the results were uneven.
