Jack Nitzsche

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Bernard Alfred "Jack" Nitzsche (Chicago, April 22, 1937 – Hollywood, August 25, 2000) was an Academy Award nominated film score composer.

[edit] Biography

In his late teens he moved from Chicago to Los Angeles, with ambitions of becoming a jazz saxophonist. He found work copying musical scores, where he met Sonny Bono, with whom he wrote the song "Needles and Pins" for Jackie DeShannon, later covered by The Searchers. His own instrumental composition "The Lonely Surfer" became a minor hit.

He eventually became arranger and conductor for the influential producer Phil Spector, and orchestrated the ambitious Wall of Sound for the song "River Deep, Mountain High" by Ike and Tina Turner. Working closely with West Coast session musicians such as Leon Russell, Glen Campbell, Carol Kaye, and Hal Blaine in a group known as The Wrecking Crew, they created the backing music for numerous sixties pop recordings by various artists such as The Monkees.

While organizing the music for The T.A.M.I. Show television special in 1964, he met The Rolling Stones, and went on to contribute the keyboard textures to their mid-sixties hits such as "Paint It Black", and the choral arrangements for "You Can't Always Get What You Want".

His masterpiece was the shimmering unearthly orchestration for the Neil Young composition "Expecting to Fly", created for Buffalo Springfield's second album, released in 1967. He then collaborated with Young on some of his most commercially successful solo recordings such as Harvest, as well as the less successful but influential Tonight's the Night album. He also played keyboards with Young and Crazy Horse, including on the Live at the Fillmore East performances.

While prolific and hard working throughout the seventies, he suffered increasingly from depression and substance abuse problems, culminating in his arrest for a violent assault on actress Carrie Snodgress in 1979, whom he was dating.

Nitzsche had also worked on film scores throughout his career, such as his contributions to the Monkees movie Head, the theme music from Village of the Giants (recycling an earlier single, "The Last Race"), and the distinctive soundtracks for The Exorcist, Performance and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. He worked with Willy DeVille on several Mink Deville albums. In the 1980s he began to concentrate more on film music rather than pop music, and became one of the most prolific film orchestrators in Hollywood at the time, winning an Academy Award for Best Song for co-writing 'Up Where We Belong' from 1982's An Officer and a Gentleman.

In 1983, he married Canadian/Native American folk singer/songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie.

His intensive output declined somewhat in the 1990s. In the mid-1990s, a clearly inebriated Nitzsche was seen in an episode of the reality show COPS, being arrested in Hollywood after brandishing a gun at some youths who had stolen his hat. In attempting to explain himself to the arresting officers he is heard exclaiming that he was an Oscar winner.

He died in Los Angeles in the year 2000 of a respiratory illness.

Jack Nitzsche was mythologized as The Dark Prince in Jimmy McDonough's biography of Neil Young, Shakey.