the rix mix

By Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 15, 2008
Neal Hefti, a former big band trumpeter, arranger and composer who worked with Count Basie and Woody Herman and later composed the memorable themes for the movie "The Odd Couple" and the campy hit TV series "Batman," has died. He was 85.

Hefti died Saturday at his home in Toluca Lake, said his son, Paul. He did not know the cause of death, but said his father had been in good health.

"Everybody in the music business loved Neal Hefti," radio and television personality Gary Owens, a longtime friend, told The Times on Tuesday.

"He was one of the really great arrangers and composers of all time," Owens said. "He worked with all those guys -- Charlie Spivak, Harry James, Woody Herman -- and he made arrangements that were just spectacular."

Described as "one of the most influential big band arrangers of the 1940s and '50s" in "The Encyclopedia of Popular Music," Hefti turned his attention to composing for film and television in the 1960s.

Among his credits as a film composer are "Sex and the Single Girl," "Harlow" (one of his most famous tunes, “Girl Talk,” came out of the score), "How to Murder Your Wife," "Boeing Boeing," "Duel at Diablo," "Barefoot in the Park," "A New Leaf," "Last of the Red Hot Lovers" and “The Odd Couple,” whose theme he reprised for the 1970s TV series.

Half of the obit. Back in high school, Neal Hefti was one of my heroes, part of a younger generation of Hollywood composers that came out of jazz & the big bands, not syrupy European late-romanticism. Mancini, Hefti, Pete Rugolo, Kenyon Hopkins, Earl Hagen, Quincy Jones; & sympatico conservatory-trained composers like Elmer Bernstein, Alex North, Jerry Goldsmith, Lalo Schifrin. In the Fifties, when Count Basie rebuilt his band & retooled his sound, Hefti was one of the arranger-composers Basie invited to contribute to the new book. Basie took that sound to Vegas, & it became "The Rat Pack" live show, tight big band style. The old Tonight Show Band leaned on it for decades.

Labels: music, obituary