Thanks, mr. Edwards

Henry Mancini, Craig Stevens and Blake Edwards

Blake Edwards, Prolific Comedy Director, Dies at 88

His publicist, Gene Schwam, said the cause was complications of pneumonia. Mr. Edwards’s wife, the actress Julie Andrews, and other family members were at his side at St. John’s Health Center, Mr. Schwam said.

What the critic Pauline Kael once described as Mr. Edwards’s “love of free-for-all lunacy” was flaunted in good movies and bad ones: in commercial successes like “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (1961) and “The Pink Panther” (1963) — the first of a series of films starring Peter Sellers as a bumbling French policeman — and in box-office disasters like the musical spy extravaganza “Darling Lili” (1970), starring Ms. Andrews.

See more

"Ride of the Valkyrie," by Stan Kenton and his Orchestra

"Ride of the Valkyrie," by Stan Kenton and his Orchestra

Santa

Covers from LPs

For more, visit 317X

Terry Snyder

One of the leading percussionists of the SABPM era, Terry Snyder worked with Bert Block's studio groups, the Bert Block Orchestra, a standard big band, and the Bell Music Orchestra, which anticipated the SABPM era with its arrangements for celesta, bells, and drums. He became a featured player on New York City radio station WNEW in 1940.

Snyder was Perry Como's favorite drummer, and he worked with Como on recordings, radio, and television from the late 1940s until his death. He sat in with a variety of groups through the early 1950s, from classical schmaltz pianist Shura to Stan Freeman's harpsichord album to light jazz combos led by Bill Clifton. He worked with Enoch Light and Lew Davies on the first four "Persuasive Percussion" LPs on Command, then was hired away by United Artists to debut their competing "Wall-to-Wall Sound" series of gatefold LPs.

Jack Nitzsche

Bernard Alfred "Jack" Nitzsche (22 April 1937 – 25 August 2000) was an arranger, producer, songwriter, and film score composer. He first came to prominence in the late 1950s as the right-hand-man of producer Phil Spector, and went on to work with the Rolling Stones, Neil Young and others.

Born in Chicago, Illinois and raised on a farm in Newaygo, Michigan, Nitzsche moved to Los Angeles, California in 1955 with ambitions of becoming a jazz saxophonist. He found work copying musical scores, where he met Sonny Bono, with whom he wrote the song "Needles and Pins" for Jackie DeShannon, later covered by Cher, The Searchers, The Ramones, Crack the Sky and Willy DeVille and Tom Petty with Stevie Nicks (Pack up the Plantation). His own instrumental composition "The Lonely Surfer" became a minor hit, as did a big-band swing arrangement of Link Wray's "Rumble".

In the 1970s he began to concentrate more on film music rather than pop music, and became one of the most prolific film orchestrators in Hollywood in the period, winning an Academy Award for Best Song for co-writing with Buffy Sainte-Marie "Up Where We Belong" from 1982's An Officer and a Gentleman (Nitzsche had already worked with Sainte-Marie on She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina in the early 1970s). Nitzsche had also worked on film scores throughout his career, such as his contributions to the Monkees movie Head, the theme music from Village of the Giants (recycling an earlier single, "The Last Race"), and the distinctive soundtracks for Performance, The Exorcist, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Hardcore (1979), The Razor's Edge, and Starman (also 1984).

He died in Hollywood in 2000 of cardiac arrest brought on by a recurring bronchial infection.

* 1963: The Lonely Surfer
* 1964: Dance To The Hits Of The Beatles
* 1966: Chopin '66
* 1972 : St. Giles Cripplegate
* 1978 : OSR Blue Collar
* 1984 : OSR The Razor's Edge
* 1991 : OSR The Indian Runner with David Lindley
* 2007 : OSR Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof (Reuses "The Last Race" as opening theme.)

Easy Listening on the BBC

See here

America - 508 years today

One more ... by mr. Buddy Morrow

Die Buddy Morrow - see here