From the moving Moon River to the groovy Pink Panther, Henry Mancini mastered the emotional connections between the music and the audience to create an incomparable body of jazz-infused tunes.
Henry was born on April 16, 1924, in Maple Heights, Ohio, to a pair of Italian immigrants: Quinto and Anna Pece Mancini.
When he was 5, the new family moved to Aliquippa, Penn., outside Pittsburgh. Quinto was a steel worker who played the flute in a local Italian American band, and it was he who insisted that his son take up music.
In high school Henry was drawn to classical, but by the time he reached the Carnegie Institute of Technology, the novice musician was cutting his teeth with the Stanley Theater pit band, led by conductor Max Adkins.
Through Adkins, Henry found his calling and transferred to the Juilliard School of Music in New York, but the U.S. Army came calling and he served in air force and infantry missions during World War II.
He joined a band in the army, and when he returned home the up-and-coming composer began to produce music for radio shows, then TV and film would follow.
The New York Times reports:
He became a staff composer for Universal-International studios in the early 1950’s and wrote music for scenes in movies like “Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” “Creature From the Black Lagoon” and “Ma and Pa Kettle at Home.” He also contributed music to one of Hollywood’s first rock musicals, “Rock, Pretty Baby.”
He left Universal-International in 1958, having received his first Academy Award nomination for his score for “The Glenn Miller Story” in 1954. He also wrote the scores for “The Benny Goodman Story” (1956) and “Touch of Evil” (1958).
Increasingly, Mr. Mancini was recognized as a pioneer in a new approach to film scores. It was an approach that moved away from the heavy symphonic treatments that had been produced by composers like Alfred Newman, Max Steiner and Miklos Rozsa and instead exploited jazz motifs, using smaller ensembles.
More awards would come, many more, as Henry was quickly becoming a global success.
He was nominated for Grammys 72 times and won 20, and was nominated for Academy Awards 18 times, collecting four Oscars for the songs “Moon River” and “Days of Wine and Roses” and the scores of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “Victor/Victoria.” Mancini recorded more than 90 albums, garnering eight gold records, The Los Angeles Times reported in 1994 — the year of his death at age 70 from pancreatic cancer.
Despite his illness, Henry was still hard at work in L.A. on his next project, one of hundreds he’d labored over during his 40-year career.
The great composer never lost touch with his hardworking, immigrant roots as he’d often say that he “never trusted this thing called success.”
Henry Mancini will be gone for 27 years on June 14, but his music plays on.
Take a listen…
Explore more of his legacy at www.henrymancini.com.
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