A competent arranger is expected to be, among other things, an excellent musician, a clever “idea” man, an inventor of new styles or patterns, and a composer of sorts. He is supposed to shun the thought of imitating any previously employed devices in his idiom.
Marlin Skiles
The Score: Jazz Scores after the Jazz Age After having watched Mike Hammer, My Gun is Quick (1957) on youtube, the interwebs led me to the below post from Hearing the Movies, a really cool blog by Jim Buhler, David Neumeyer and Rob Deemer. The opening credit sequence is the first installment of Marlin Skiles’ jazz score: a really cool big band piece, with a drum solo (what! say it isn’t so!)…turns out that Skiles was a prolific composer and arranger, and his jazz-noire score for this film rivals my all time favorite, Elmer Bernstein and Chico Hamilton’s Sweet Smell of…