[Dixielandjazz] Neal Hefti RIP

[Robert Ringwald]

Neal Hefti, composer, is dead at 85

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By Bruce Weber
Published: October 15, 2008
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Neal Hefti, whose renown as a forward-looking composer and arranger for 
Woody Herman
and Count Basie was probably overwhelmed forever after he went to Hollywood 
and wrote
the theme for the 1960's television show "Batman," and for the movie and 
television
versions of "The Odd Couple," died Saturday at home in Toluca Lake, 
California He
was 85.

He died suddenly from an undetermined cause, his son Paul said. Hefti's 
death was
first reported in a blog posting by a friend, the singer Nancy Sinatra, on 
the website
www.sinatrafamily.com.

Over the years, Hefti, first known as a jazz trumpeter in the 1940s and 
1950s, was
much admired and much in demand as an arranger, conductor and occasional 
record producer;
he worked with Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Mel Tormé and Tony Bennett, among 
others.

He also led his own bands, and he was active as a player until 1960.

But his greatest sphere of influence was as an arranger and composer for 
other jazz
artists. His early travels with jazz bands took him to New York, where he 
was mesmerized
by the bebop playing of Dizzy Gillespie, and joined the Herman band - known 
as First
Herd - in 1944. He was influential in moving that band from its swing roots 
in the
direction of bebop.

He spent only two years with the Herd; when he left in 1946, he took the 
singer Frances
Wayne, his new wife, with him. But by then he had created new arrangements 
for Herman's
compositions like "Woodchopper's Ball" and "Blowin' Up a Storm," and 
composed tunes
like "Apple Honey," "Wild Root" and "The Good Earth."
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He toured with Harry James and he arranged tunes for Buddy Rich. Though he 
also toured
and recorded with his own bands, sometimes with his wife, he never achieved 
real
success as a bandleader. For him, the decade of the 1950's was characterized 
by his
association with the Basie band, for which he wrote perhaps his best known 
jazz tunes,
including "Splanky," "Little Pony," "Li'l Darlin',." whose tempo Basie 
famously slowed
down to a luscious and sensual crawl, and the perky "Cute."

"If it wasn't for Neal Hefti, the Basie band wouldn't sound as good as it 
does,"
Miles Davis said in 1955. "But Neal's band can't play those same 
arrangements nearly
as well."

Starting in the 1960s, Hefti found great success writing television and film 
scores.
In addition to writing the theme for "The Odd Couple" (1968), which would be 
burned
into the memories of baby boomers with the creation of the television series 
in 1970,
he composed the scores for two other Neil Simon films, "Barefoot in the 
Park" (1967)
and "Last of the Red Hot Lovers" (1972). His other film work included "Duel 
at Diablo"
(1966), a brutal Western; Elaine May's farce "A New Leaf" (1971), and the 
gleeful
sex comedies "Sex and the Single Girl" (1964), "Boeing Boeing" (1965) and 
"How to
Murder Your Wife" (1965).
There was a politically incorrect strain to Hefti's work, possibly 
tongue-in-cheek;
for the 1965 biographical film "Harlow," he and Bobby Troupe wrote the 
bluesy, winkingly
sexist tune, Girl Talk." (For the same movie, Hefti wrote "Lonely Girl," the 
Bobby
Vinton hit.)

"He felt his true work was done for the movies and television," Paul Hefti 
said in
a telephone interview on Wednesday. What his father especially liked about 
writing
for the screen, he said, was that he was not restricted by a band's 
instrumentation,
that he could write for whatever combo, for whatever musicians he wanted.

Oddly enough, his most famous tune is among his least musically interesting, 
even
if it was somehow brilliantly apt: the jauntily arch and repetitive theme 
for the
television series "Batman." Hefti said that the show was so campy it took 
him weeks
to come up with a suitable melody. It won him his only Grammy.

Neal Paul Hefti was born in Hastings, Nebraska, on Oct. 29, 1922. He 
received a trumpet
as a Christmas present when he was 10 years old; according to family lore, 
his mother
encouraged him to play so that, if he were drafted, he would be in the band 
and not
the infantry. By the time he was out of high school, he was arranging and 
playing
for local bands in order to contribute to the household. He saw Count Basie 
and Dizzy
Gillespie play when they passed through nearby Omaha before he ever saw them 
in New
York.

His wife died in 1978; a daughter died in 1997. In addition to his son, also 
of Toluca
Lake, Hefti is survived by a brother, Joe, of Pensacola, Florida; a sister, 
Pat Wacha,
of Clarkson, Nebraska; and three grandchildren.

"He told me he tore up more paper on 'Batman' than on any other work he ever 
did,"
Paul Hefti said. "He had to find something that worked with the lowest 
common denominator,
so it would appeal to kids, yet wouldn't sound stupid. What he came up with 
was a
12-bar blues with a guitar hook and one word." More Articles in Arts »



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January 20, 1781.