Paul Desmond (November 25, 1924 - May 30, 1977), born Paul Emil Breitenfeld, was a jazz alto saxophonist and composer born in San Francisco, best known for the work he did in the Dave Brubeck Quartet and for penning that group's greatest hit, "Take Five." Known to have possessed an idiosyncratic wit, he was one of the most popular musicians to come out of the West Coast's "cool jazz" scene.
In addition to his work with Brubeck he led several of his own groups and did significant collaborations with artists such as Gerry Mulligan, Jim Hall and Chet Baker. After years of chain smoking and general poor health, Desmond succumbed to lung cancer in 1977 following one last tour with Brubeck.
Maurice Jarre (b. September 24, 1924, Lyons, France - March 29, 2009) was a French composer and conductor. Although he composed several concert works, he is best known for his film scores for motion pictures, particularly those of David Lean: Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965), and A Passage to India (1984). All three of these scores won Academy Awards.
Jarre started studying music at a late age, unlike many of his fellow musicians. He first enrolled in the engineering school at the Sorbonne. However, he decided to pursue his education in music instead. He left the Sorbonne, against his father's will, and enrolled at Conservatoire de Paris to study composition (with Arthur Honegger), harmony and chose percussion as his major instrument. He became the Théâtre National Populaire director, and recorded his first movie score in France in 1951.
In 1961 Jarre musical life experienced a major turn when the movie producer Sam Spiegel asked him to write the score of Lawrence of Arabia for which he won his first Academy Award.He followed with The Train (1964) and another great success in Doctor Zhivago that earned him his second Academy Award.
He was again nominated for an Academy award for scoring The Message (aka Mohammad, Messenger of God) in 1976 for the director and producer Moustapha Akkad.
In the 80's, Jarre turned his hand to science fiction, with scores for Enemy Mine (1985) and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985). The latter is written for full orchestra, augmented by a chorus, four grand pianos, a pipe organ, digeridoo, fujara, a battery of exotic percussion and three ondes Martenot (which feature in several of Jarre's other scores, including Lawrence of Arabia, Jesus of Nazareth, and The Bride).
Now officially retired, Jarre scored his last film in 2001, a TV movie about the Holocaust entitled Uprising.
Jarre wrote mainly for orchestras, but began to favor to synthesized music in the 1980's, mostly for practical rather than aesthetic motivations, many critics feel. Jarre denies this and has pointed out that his electronic score for Witness was actually more laborious, time-consuming and expensive to produce than an orchestral score. A number of his scores from that era also feature electronic/acoustic blends, such as Gorillas in the Mist, Dead Poets Society, and Jacob's Ladder.
His most famous works to date include the broad unique Lawrence of Arabia and the Russian-flavored Doctor Zhivago.
Also wrote the music to the 1966 film Grand Prix, starring James Garner and Yves Montand and directed by John Frankenheimer.
Jarre has been married four times.
He is the father of composer Jean Michel and screenwriter Kevin.
Henry Mancini (April 16, 1924 - June 14, 1994) was an Academy Award winning American composer, conductor, and arranger. He is remembered particularly for being a composer of film and television scores. Mancini also won a record number of Grammy awards, including a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995. Among his best-known works are the theme to The Pink Panther and Moon River.
*** Marlon Brando, Jr. (April 3, 1924 - July 1, 2004) was an American actor who performed for over half a century.
He was perhaps best known for his roles as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and his Academy Award-winning performance as Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront (1954), both directed by Elia Kazan, and his Academy Award-winning performance as Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972). In middle age he also played Colonel Walter Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (1979), also directed by Coppola, and delivered an Academy Award-nominated performance as Paul in Last Tango in Paris (1972).
Brando had a significant impact on film acting. He was the foremost example of the "method" acting style, and became notorious for his "mumbling" diction,[1] but his mercurial performances were highly regarded and he is now considered one of the greatest American film actors of the twentieth century. Director Martin Scorsese said of him, "He is the marker. There's 'before Brando' and 'after Brando'." Actor Jack Nicholson once said, "When Marlon dies, everybody moves up one."
Brando was also an activist, supporting many issues, notably the American Civil Rights and various American Indian Movements.
György Sándor Ligeti (May 28, 1923 – June 12, 2006) was a Romanian born 20th century composer. Born to a Hungarian-speaking Jewish family, he briefly lived in Hungary before later becoming an Austrian citizen. Many of his works are well known in classical music circles, but to the general public, he is best known for the various pieces featured in the Stanley Kubrick films 2001: A Space Odyssey [Atmospheres, Requiem, Lux Aeterna], The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut.
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Hank Williams (September 17, 1923 – January 1, 1953), born Hiram King Williams, was an American singer-songwriter and musician regarded as among the greatest country music stars of all time. He charted eleven number one songs between 1948 and 1953, though unable to read or write music to any significant degree. His hits included "Your Cheatin' Heart", "Hey Good Lookin'" and "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry".
Williams died at age 29; his death is widely believed to have resulted from a mixture of alcohol and drugs. His son Hank Williams, Jr., daughter Jett Williams, and grandchildren Hank Williams III, Holly Williams, and Hilary Williams are also professional singers.
His songs have been recorded by hundreds of other artists, many of whom have also had hits with the tunes, in a range of pop, gospel, blues and rock styles. Williams has been covered by performers including Townes Van Zandt, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen , Beck Hansen, Johnny Cash, Tony Bennett, The Residents, Patsy Cline, Ray Charles and Louis Armstrong.
[8924 Mancini / 8923 G. Ligeti / 8923 Fred Steiner]
Fred Steiner (b. February 24, 1923, New York, NY) received a degree in music composition from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music.
Steiner has written for a number of television series that enjoyed great popularity in their day or in syndication. The most auspicious are the many episodes of the original series of Star Trek to which he contributed original scores (more than any other composer). An article he wrote for the Library of Congress, "Music for Star Trek: Scoring a Television Show in the Sixties." authoritatively outlines and defines the contributions of all the original underscore composers of this series.
Another of Steiner's famous works, "Park Avenue Beat," was used from 1957 to 1966 as the theme song to Perry Mason and was re-recorded by Dick DeBenedictis for the subsequent made-for-TV movies in 1985. Steiner also composed the main theme to The Bullwinkle Show and contributed music to episodes of Lost in Space, The Twilight Zone, and Amazing Stories.
His feature film work includes original music (Run for the Sun, The St. Valentine's Day Massacre) and orchestration/adaptation (sometimes uncredited) for other composers, including The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965).
Neal Hefti (born October 29, 1922 in Hastings, Nebraska) is an American jazz trumpeter, composer, tune writer, and arranger.
He began arranging professionally in his teens, when he wrote charts for Nat Towles. He became a prominent composer and arranger while playing trumpet for Woody Herman; while working for Herman he provided new arrangements for "Woodchopper's Ball" and "Blowin' Up a Storm," and composed "The Good Earth" and "Wild Root." After leaving Herman's band in 1946, Hefti concentrated on arranging and composing, although he occasionally led his own bands. He is especially known for his charts for Count Basie such as "Li'l Darlin'" and "Cute."
In the 1960's and later he composed and arranged mainly for movies and television. He wrote the background music for movies such as Sex and the Single Girl, How to Murder Your Wife, Synanon, Boeing Boeing, Harlow, Lord Love a Duck, Duel at Diablo, Oh Dad Poor Dad Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad, and Barefoot in the Park.
His best-known contributions of this period are the themes of the TV series and movies such as Batman and The Odd Couple.
[8923 Fred Steiner / 8922 Hefti / 8922 E. Bernstein]
Although Elmer Bernstein (April 4, 1922, New York, NY - 18 August 2004) was not in any way related to composer and conductor, Leonard Bernstein, there was a slight facial similarity between the two men and, within the world of professional music, they were distinguished from each other by the use of the nicknames, Bernstein West (Elmer) and Bernstein East (Leonard). During his childhood he performed professionally as a dancer and an actor, in the latter case playing the part of Caliban in The Tempest on Broadway and he also won several prizes for his painting.Throughout his life, he demonstrated an enthusiam for an even wider spectrum of the arts than his childhood interests would imply and, in 1959, when he was scoring The Story on Page One, he considered becoming a novelist and asked the film's screenwriter, Clifford Odets, to give him lessons in writing fiction. He gravitated toward music by his own choice at the age of 12, at which time he was given a scholarship in piano by Henriette Michelson, a Juilliard teacher who guided him throughout his entire career as a pianist. She took him to play some of his improvisations for composer Aaron Copland. Copland was encouraging and selected Israel Citkowitz as a teacher for the young boy. Bernstein's music has some stylistic similarities to Copland's music, most notably in his western scores and in his spirited score for the 1958 film adaptation of Erskine Caldwell's novel, God's Little Acre.
He wrote the theme songs or other music for more than 200 films and TV shows, including The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, The Ten Commandments (1956), The Man with the Golden Arm, To Kill a Mockingbird, Robot Monster, Ghostbusters, and the fanfare used in the National Geographic television specials. His theme for The Magnificent Seven is also familiar to television viewers, as it was used in commercials for Marlboro cigarettes. Bernstein also provided the score to many of the short films of Ray and Charles Eames.
Along with many in Hollywood, Bernstein faced censure during the McCarthy era of the 1950s. He was "gray-listed" (not banned, but kept off major projects) due to sympathy with left-wing causes, and had to work on low-budget science fiction films.
Bernstein was recognized by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association with Golden Globes for his scores for To Kill a Mockingbird and Hawaii. In 1963 he was awarded the Emmy for Excellence in Television for his score of The Making of The President, 1960. He is the recipient of Western Heritage Awards for The Magnificent Seven (1960) and The Hallelujah Trail (1965). He received five Grammy nominations from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and garnered two of Broadway's coveted Tony Award nominations for How Now Dow Jones and Merlin.
Bernstein died of cancer in his sleep, at his home in Ojai, California, on August 18, 2004.
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The Great Escape (1963)
The Great Escape, written by James Clavell, W.R. Burnett, and Walter Newman (uncredited), and directed by John Sturges is a popular 1963 World War II film starring Steve McQueen, Richard Attenborough and James Garner, based on a true story about Allied prisoners of war with a record for escaping from German prisoner-of-war camps. The Luftwaffe placed them in a new more secure camp, Stalag Luft III, from which they promptly formed a plan to break out 250 men.
The film was based upon the factual book of the same name by Paul Brickhill, who observed the actual events as a prisoner, as did George Harsh who supplied the introduction. Harsh, one of the few Americans in the British section of Stalag Luft III, died in 1980 at age 72.
Featuring an all-star cast including McQueen (whose motorcycle chase is the film's most remembered action scene; he also did many of his own stunts), James Garner, Richard Attenborough, James Coburn, Gordon Jackson, Charles Bronson and Donald Pleasence, The Great Escape is regarded as a classic and frequently repeated on television. The film marked Attenborough's first appearance in a major Hollywood blockbuster.
The march tune that serves as the film's theme, written by Elmer Bernstein, has also become a classic, particularly in English football.
Mark Alburger (b. 1957, Upper Darby, PA) is an award-winning, eclectic ASCAP composer of postminimal, postpopular, and postcomedic sensibilities. He is Music Director of San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra and San Francisco Cabaret Opera, Editor-Publisher of 21st-Century Music and New Music, and Professor Emeritus in Music Theory and Literature at Diablo Valley College. His principal teachers were Gerald Levinson, Joan Panetti, and James Freeman at Swarthmore College (B.A.); Jules Langert at Dominican University (M.A.); Christopher Yavelow at Claremont University (Ph.D.); and Terry Riley. Dr. Alburger has composed 406 major works over the past 48 years, including chamber music, concertos, oratorios, operas, song cycles, and symphonies. His complete catalogue is being issued on discs from New Music. Alburger's multiple blogs include: markalburger.blogspot.com,
markalburger2022.blogspot.com,
markalburgerworks.blogspot.com, markalburgerevents.blogspot.com, markalburgermusichistory.blogspot.
com, 21st-centurymusic.blogspot.com
