Johnny Mandel (23/11/25-29/6/20)

It’s not often the case that a jazz musician has won a Hollywood Oscar, but this happened to composer and former trumpeter/trombonist Johnny Mandel in 1965 for his ‘Love Theme from The Sandpiper’. But, for every ‘Shadow Of Your Smile’ (its better-known title) or ‘Theme From M*A*S*H’, there had been equally memorable instrumentals such as ‘Hershey Bar’ (made popular by Stan Getz), ‘Straight Life’ (written for Count Basie) or ‘Black Nightgown’. This last was just one of the tunes from his first credited movie score, I Want To Live (1958), but he soon went on to write background music for numerous more mainstream vehicles such as Point Blank and Being There.

Starting out as a big-band sideman during World War II and continuing till 1953, when he played in Basie’s trombone section, he also contributed originals to the bebop-influenced late-40s bands of Woody Herman and Artie Shaw. Moving to the West Coast to write for television shows and then eventually the movies, over the decades he also arranged numerous vocal albums for people as different as Frank Sinatra, Natalie Cole, Michael Jackson and Barbra Streisand. Perhaps the assignment that covered all the bases was Shirley Horn’s Here’s To Life (1991) which, as well as a couple of his own standards, provided sympathetic arrangements for the singer that were alternately lush and discreet; the written french-horn solo on the title-track never fails to move this listener, for instance. The album also earned Mandel one of his five Grammy awards.