The Arrangers

Edward Ernest Sauter of Sauter Finegan Orchestra (born Dec 2nd 1914 in Brooklyn; died April 21 1981in NYC was a jazz arranger most associated with the swing era.
He originally played trumpet and drums before becoming an arranger. He studied at Columbia Universityand the Juilliard School. His first success as an arranger was with Red Norvo's orchestra. He also arranged music for Benny Goodman, including some of his most difficult pieces. From 1952 to 1958 Sauter was co-leader of the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra. In 1961 he worked with Stan Getz on the album Focus.

He also did composition for several films including 1965's Mickey One where he worked with Getz again. He also did television work including the third season theme to Rod Serling's Night Gallery. In 2003 he was inducted into the Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame

Ernest Brooks Wilkins Jr. (bornJuly 20, 1922 in St Loius Missour died june 5, 1999 in Copenhagen) was a jazz arranger and writer who also played tenor sax. He might be best known for his work with Count Basie. He also wrote for Tommy Dorsey, Harry James, and Dizzy Gillespie. In addition to that he was musical director for albums by Cannonball Adderley, Dinah Washington, Oscar Peterson, and Buddy Rich.^[1]

In his early career he had played in a military band and was then in Earl Hines's last big band. In 1951 he began working with Basie he wrote songs like Every Day I Have The Blues. After 1955 he went free-lance as a jazz arranger and writer of songs as he was much in demand at that time. His success declined in the 1960's but revived after work with Clark Terry. This led to his touring Europe and eventually settling in Denmark, where he would live for the rest of his life. In Denmark he formed the "Almost Big Band" so he could write for a band of his own formation. The idea was partly inspired by his wife Jenny. Denmark at that time had several promising jazz musicians, it also had noted American ex-patriate's like Kenny Drew and Ed Thigpen who joined the band. The band released four albums, but after 1991 he became too ill to do much with it.Ernie Wilkins died on June 5, 1999 of a stroke.

Quincy Delightt Jones Jr. (born Mar 14 1933 ) is an American Music Impresario, Conductor, record producer, musical arranger, film composer and trumpeter.

During 50 years in the entertainment industry Jones' work has earned him more than 70 Grammy Award nominations, more than 25 Grammy Awards, and a Grammy Legends Award in 1991. He is best known as the producer of two of the top-selling records of all time: the album Thriller, by Michael Jackson, which sold 50 million copies worldwide, and the charity song We are the World.

In 1968, Jones and his songwriting partner Bob Russell became the first Arfican Americans to be nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Original Song category. That same year, he became the first African-American to be nominated twice within the same year when he was nominated for Best Original Score for his work on the music of In Cold Blood. Jones was also the first (and so far, the only) African-American to be nominated as a producer in the category of Best Picture (in 1986, for The Color Purple). He was also the first African-American to win the Academy's Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, in 1995. He is tied with sound designer Willie D. Burton as the most Oscar-nominated African-American, each of them having seven nominations

Johnny Mandel (born 23rd Nov 1925 in New York) is an American composer and arranger of popular songs, film music and Jazz. Among the musicians he has worked with are Count Basie (for whom he arranged in the 1950s), Frank Sinatra (for whom he arranged Ring a Ding Ding, 1960) and Shirley Horn. In 1966 he and Paul Francis Webster won the Grammy Award for Son of the Year for The Shadow of Your Smile (Love Theme from The Sandpiper), which has been performed by hundreds of artists including Tony Bennett, for whom it became a recognition song. He won the Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocal in 1992 for Natalie Cole and Nat King Cole's "Unforgettable" and again in 1993 for Shirley Horn's "Here's to Life". At the age of 80, he contributed importantly on Tony Bennett's Grammy-awarded 2004 The Art of Romance as the arranger and conducting the orchestra. Both had collaborated before on Bennett's classic Movie Song Album in 1966, for which Mandel arranged and conducted his own two standard film songs and was the album's musical director. Among Mandel's most famous compositions are "Suicide Is Painless" (theme from the movie and TV series MASH, "Close Enough for Love", "Emily" and "A Time for Love". He has written a great many film scores, perhaps most notably The Sandpiper. Mandel and Paul Francis Webster collaborated on the Oscar winning song "The Shadow of Your Smile" from the film The Sandpiper in 1965

Buddy Bregman (born 9th July 1930) is an American musical arranger, record producer and composer. He has worked with many of the greatest musical artists of 20th Century popular music including; Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, Peggy Lee, and Frank Sinatra Born in Chicago, he studied at UCLA and during his sophomore year, wrote 'I Need Your Lovin' with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller which subsequently became his first hit record.

As an arranger, conductor and the A&R head of Norman Granz's newly established Verve Records, he also scored and orchestrated many major motion pictures including; 'The Pajama Game, Crime in the Streets, Secret of the Purple Reef and several others. 1956 saw Bregman orchestrate and arrange three albums which subsequently went platinum, and which still remain today one of his greatest achievements. Two of the albums represented the commencement of Ella Fitzgerald's epic 'Songbooks' project.

Bregman's intelligent and sensitive arrangements for Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook, and Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers & Hart Songbook would establish Fitzgerald as an international star, and secure her legacy as one of the supreme interpreters of the Great American Songbook. Bregman also arranged several of Fitzgerald's early Verve singles. Bing Crosby's 1956 album Bing Sings Whilst Bregman Swings which Bregman also arranged and conducted also later went platinum.

After his tenure at Verve, Bregman became a television producer and director, working with great success for the BBC and also as Head of Entertainment for ITV. Bregman then wrote Jump Jim Crow, a musical for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and later went into London-based independent TV and film production, and subsequently produced and directed a feature film starring Olivia Newton-John. Upon returning to the United States, Bregman worked as a television producer and director.

Ralph Burns (June 29, 1922 in Newton, Massachusetts – November 21, 2001 in Los Angeles), California) was a songwriter, bandleader, composer, conductor, arranger and pianist. He was one of the few celebrities to ever win all three major awards that are considered for acting: Oscar, Emmy and a Tony.

Ralph Burns began playing the piano as a child. In 1938, he attended the New England Conservatory of Music. He admitted that he learned the most about jazz by transcribing the works of Count Basie, Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington. While a student, Burns lived in Frances Wayne’s home. Wayne was already a well know big band singer and her brother Nick Jerret was a bandleader who began working with Burns. He found himself in the company of such famous performers as Nat King Cole and Art Tatum.

After Burns moved to New York in the early 1940’s, he met Charlie Barnet and the two began working together. In 1944, he joined the Woody Herman band with members Neal Hefti, Bill Harris, Flip Phillips, Cubby Jackson and Dave Tough. Together, the group developed one of the most powerful and distinctive sound. For 15 years, Burns wrote or arranged many of the bands major hits including Bijou, Northwest Passage and Apple Honey, and on the longer work Lady McGowan’s Dream and the three-part Summer Sequence.

Burns worked with numerous other musicians. Stan Getz was featured as a tenor saxophone soloist in Early Autumn, a huge hit for the band and the launching platform for Getz’s solo career. Russian Igor Stravinsky composed Ebony Concerto exclusively for the Herman band to record. Burns also worked in a small band with soloists including Bill Harris and Charlie Ventura.

The success of the Herman band provided Burns the ability to record under his own name in the 1950’s. He collaborated with Billy Strayhorn, Lee Konitz and Ben Webster to create both jazz and classical recordings. He wrote compositions for Tony Bennett and Johnny Mathis and later Aretha Franklin and Natalie Cole. Burns was responsible for the arrangement and introduction of a string orchestra on two of Ray Charles’s biggest hits, Come Rain or Come Shine and Georgia on My Mind.

In the 1960’s, Burns was freed from touring as a band pianist, and began composing for Broadway including the major show Chicago, Funny Girl, No, No Nanette, and Sweet Charity. In 1971, Burns first film score was for Woody Allen’s Bananas. Burns worked with film-director Bob Fosse and in 1972 won Academy Award for Cabaret. Fosse again employed Burns to create the soundtrack for [[All That Jazz]] for which he also won an Academy Award in 1979. He later created the soundtracks for Lenny and [[Urban Cowboy]] and Martin Scorsese’s jazz-themed New York, New York. In 1982, Burns won an Academy Award for his work in Annie. Baryshnikov on Broadway in 1980 earned Burns an Emmy Award for his work. Burns won Tony Awards in 1999 for the Broadway musical Fosse and posthumously in 2002 for Thoroughly Modern Millie. In the 1990’s, Burns arranged music for Mel Tormé, John Pizzarelli and Michael Feinstein.

In 2001, Ralph Burns died from complications of a recent stroke and pneumonia. He was survived by one sister, Nancy Lane (Burns), and three brothers, Leo, Joe, and Gale.

Ralph Burns was inducted into the New England Jazz Hall of Fame in 2004.

Bennett Lester Carter (August 8, 1907 – July 12, 2003) was an American jazz alto saxophonist, trumpeter, composer, arranger, and bandleader. He was a major figure in jazz from the 1930s to the 1990s, and was recognised as such by other jazz musicians who called him King. Carter was admired for his ability to write saxophone solis, which are sections of music that the entire section plays as one unit in the manner of a solo. He was a Kennedy Center honoree in 1996.

As a youth, Carter lived in Harlem around the corner from Bubber Miley who was Duke Ellington's star trumpeter. Carter was inspired by Miley and bought a trumpet, but when he found he couldn't play like Miley he traded the trumpet in for a saxophone.

Carter began playing professionally at 15. He first recorded in 1928 and formed his first big band the following year. He played with Fletcher Henderson in 1930 and 1931, then briefly led McKinney's Cotton Pickers before returning to lead his own band in 1932. The few recordings his band made between 1933 and 1934 are considered by most jazz scholars to be milestones in early swing arranging. They were sophisticated and very complex arrangements, and a number of them became swing standards which were performed by other bands ("Blue Lou" is a great example of this). He also arranged for Henderson and Duke Ellington during these years and wrote two hits, "Blues in My Heart" and "When Lights are Low." By the early 1930s he and Johnny Hodges were considered the leading alto players of the day. Carter also quickly became a leading trumpet soloist, having rediscovered the instrument. He recorded extensively on trumpet in the 1930s. Also, in 1933, Carter took part in an amazing series of sessions that featured the British band leader Spike Hughes, who came to New York specifically to organize a series of recordings featuring the best Black musicians available. These 14 sides were only issued in England at the time, though they are available on CD and are worthwhile looking for. (The musicians were mainly made up from member of Carter's band and from Luis Russell's.)

In 1935 he moved to Europe, where he became staff arranger for the British Broadcasting Corporation dance orchestra and made several records. He returned to the United States in 1938 and led a big band and sextet before moving to Los Angeles in 1943 to write for movie studios.

Sy Oliver

Melvin "Sy" Oliver (born December 17, 1910 in Battle Creek, Michigan — died May 28, 1988 in New York City) was a jazz arranger, trumpeter, composer, singer and bandleader. His mother was a piano teacher and his father was a multi-instrumentalist who made a name for himself demonstrating saxophones at a time that instrument was little used outside of marching bands.

Oliver left home at 17 to play with Zack White and his Chocolate Beau Brummels and later with Alphonse Trent. He sang and played trumpet with these bands, becoming known for his "growling" horn playing.

He joined Jimmie Lunceford's band in 1933 and contributed many hit arrangements to the band, including "My Blue Heaven" and "Ain't She Sweet". In 1939, he became one of the first African Americans with a prominent role in a white band when he joined Tommy Dorsey as an arranger, though he ceased playing trumpet at that time. He led the transition of the Dorsey band from Dixieland to modern big band. His joining was instrumental in Buddy Rich's decision to join Dorsey. His arrangement of "On the Sunny Side of the Street" was big hit for Dorsey, as was his own composition, "Yes Indeed", a gospel-jazz tune that was later recorded by Ray Charles. After leaving Dorsey, he continued working as a free-lance arranger and as music director for Decca Records. In later years, up until 1980, he led his own jazz band, for which he took up the trumpet again.

Sy Oliver

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Last modified: 18/02/2012